Robert Wilson is an American theatre practitioner, but he's also much more. His practice has inspired a re-imagining of what theatre can be. This essay will explore the ways in which Robert Wilson makes theatre and what some of his influences have been.
Essay on Robert Wilson's influences and influence -by Jamie Barton
Robert Wilson‘s work has changed
and inspired the reimagining of theatre to a large extent by actualising the
potential of a multi-disciplinary approach to making theatre. Wilson is not only
a theatre director; he is also a painter, sculptor, choreographer, performer,
video artist, designer, and light and sound engineer. His work is
a form what Hans Thies-Lehmann has termed Postdramatic
theatre. The postdramatic covers a broad range of theatre performance, but can
be described as theatre that does not centre on representational drama. The
postdramatic is still theatre, but it
no longer depends upon the actions of
telling a story, or telling a story through audio language; text and plot no
longer takes pre-eminence over everything else that happens on the stage. The
theatrical signs, hierarchical contents, and narratives of conventional theatre
are re-evaluated, and re-organised; deconstructed
as some might say. Instead focus is turned to the emotions, sensations, and
possible inherent meaning related to the experience of things like time, space,
body, image, and media. Theatre no longer adheres to the ‘physics of the real
world‘, and the theatre becomes a place to explore the many ways in which we
can experience, perceive, interpret, philosophise and think about the world (Lehmann,
2006) .
Wilson says:
“Often I
feel that what I’m seeing onstage is based on a lie. You know, an actor thinks
he’s being natural but he’s not, he’s acting natural and that is something that
is artificial. By being artificial, I
think you can…know more about yourself, be closer to…a truth” (Fishaut,
2008) .
He Makes theatre with this
philosophy in mind and takes a formalist approach to theatre, treating the
stage as a place to build an artificial construct, and act in an artificial
manner, not a naturalistic one.
Wilson’s theatre is directed toward the presentation of images, often with an
absence of words, or with long or complete silences.
To achieve his vision Wilson makes theatre through
a process of applying inherent techniques, and insights, from various art and
design fields. Wilson uses time, space, silence, body movement, image, colour,
structure, and design in place of action, plot and dialogue etc. His work has
been termed as theatre of images by Bonnie
Marranca (Marranca, 1996), and theatre of
visions by Stefan Brecht (Counsell, 2001, p. 179). To understand in what
ways, and to what extent, Wilson applies these approaches to theatre, I will
look at his artistic life, and life in general, to find examples of where he
has used influences from different avenues of art and thought in some of his theatre
works.
As a child Wilson suffered from a speech
impediment caused by an auditory processing disorder. This disorder means that
he“experience[d] the native language as if he
were listening to a foreign language…Eventually, the children acquire language
through visual cues, gestures and repetition" (Bernstein, 2006, p. 20) . Visual cues, gestures, repetition and silence can
be seen in 1969’s three hour ‘silent opera’ The
King of Spain (fig 1) where, slowly, “characters piled straw
on a stage, lit candles, slid brass rings along a wire” (Counsell, 2001, p. 179) without any context or apparent
motivation for their actions. This can be seen as expressive evidence of the
influence of Wilson’s organising of the world, through the structures of communication
(kinesics) he learned as a child.
The speech
impediment was cured at the age of seventeen when he met Byrd Hoffman and took
movement therapy with her. Wilson thinks of Hoffman as the first artist he ever
met (Shevstova, 2007, p. 1) .
“Byrd
Hoffman had profound knowledge of the body…She told me one day that I was
speeding in place. I should learn how to relax and slow down my speech. Sooooooo sloooow…She taught formal ballet
classes, but sometimes she would play Mozart on the piano and tell the students
to improvise…I think of Byrd Hoffman all the time and I adopted her techniques
as part of my way of working” (Bernstein, 2006, p. 26) .
A central component in Wilson’s
work is movement in time. Wilson says that he uses the natural span of time,
the time it takes the sun to set, or an egg to hatch; a time in which to think
as something is happening. Not speeded up time in which to fit a story. (Shevstova, 2007, p. 56) . He shows this on
stage by the method of having things move very slowly. Wilson is trying to
convey the effect or experiencing of time passing, not the illusion of time passing. This can be
seen in act four, scene two of Einstein
on the Beach ; a bar of light on a pitch black stage, with no actors, takes
20 minutes to be lifted upright, it then hovers and fades out to cause the
mesmerising and hallucinatory effect that it is travelling further away from
the audience. (Shevstova, 2007, p. 109) . The experience of
watching this bar of light ascend over this span of time, along with the organ
music and operatic non-lyrical singing, is designed to cause an ethereal
trance-like effect; a sensual experience of the thing happening in time.
The bar of light, arguably the scene holistically, becomes the actor.
Wilson drew
lots of inspiration from what he learned in New York in the sixties; a time
when the world was changing and postmodern philosophies were firmly in the
consciousness of the American art world. The previous experimental theatrical
movements of fifties America drew heavily on revolutionary movements within the
plastic arts, as there were no precedents being set in traditional theatre for
any new forms of theatre to work with. This meant that barriers that normally
existed between art, dance, music, and theatre were beginning to be dismantled
by performers who wanted to develop new spheres of theatrical expression that
rejected the status quo. This
situation, along with the introduction
of Antonin Artaud’s The Theatre and it’s
Double, and Einstein’s scientific theories, is where the origin of the
American avant-garde theatre broke ground and began to grow shoots in to the
sixties (Aronson, 2000).
Wilson graduated
from the Pratt Institute with a B.F.A. in architecture in 1966 (Shevstova,
2007) .
He says “I was studying architecture, but what I was doing was a sort of
crossover between architecture and performance, design, and it was a time in
the sixties where you had this crossover” (Shevstova, 2007, p. 4) . Wilson took
lectures from Sybil Moholy-Nagy, an architect and art historian. These lectures
inspired his already strong obsession with order and disorder. Wilson says
“What I learned from her (Nagy) was to apply order and disorder in a way that
is meaningful. An architect can design a
structure, but within that structure you can let your imagination run free”
(Bernstein, 2006, p. 38). This thinking can be seen in 1976’s four hour ‘new’
opera Einstein on the Beach. Not only does the whole piece separate the component
parts of theatre, namely image, movement, music, sound, time and light, in to architectonic
compositions (Holmberg, 1998, pp. 9-22) , it manifests architectonic
thinking in its set design. The ‘scaffolding box’ in act four scene three (fig 1)
is split in to fifteen sub boxes in which lighted symbols flash, performers
move and make cacophonies of melodic sound, clear elevators travel up and down
and side to side, a performer flies across the stage, and two performers repeat
movements in front of the box as the scene builds in volume and speed while
Albert Einstein plays an electric violin.
The whole scene becomes the architecture of ordered disorder.
[Fig 1: Einstein on the Beach act four, scene three. (LAopera.org, 2013) ]
 |
One of the
most notable people to have an influence on Wilson was the composer and music
theorist John Cage.
“Essential
to Cage’s aesthetic was the concept of silence. It came to represent space,
non-intentionality, freedom, and creativity. It came from his realization…that
it was impossible, from a definitional standpoint, to distinguish music from
“noise”…stated simply, music, for Cage, thus consisted of all the sounds and
silences within a given time structure” (Aronson, 2000, p. 31).
It was this influence that led him and
Philip Glass to compose and produce Einstein
on the Beach in the way that they did; with mostly non-lyrical vocal
singing and music based on structure and time that produces its own rhythm,
rather than focusing on melody etcetera (UC Berkeley Events, 2012).
Another
major influence was the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham. Cunningham believed
that the body’s potential for movement was limitless, and his experiments with
space on the stage informed all areas of performance art. He said:
“I used to be told that you see the centre of
the space as the most important…I decided to open up the space to consider it
equal, and any place, occupied or not, just as important as any other…if there
are no fixed points, then every point is equally interesting and equally
changing” (Aronson, 2000, p. 24).
This ‘philosophy of space’ is
reflected in the way Wilson treats the stage space as a whole, with its centre
everywhere. An example is his use of lighting:
“What Bob does
with light…is to separate all the elements from each other and control them
independently….He wants the floor treated as a whole unit and separately
painted with light. He wants the
background treated as another whole...Then he wants the human figure separately
etched out with light, and very often he wants the head or even nose of that
figure separately lighted” (Fishaut, 2008) .
An
influence on Wilson from the painting world is the French post-impressionist
painter Paul Cezanne, with his “principle of composition (or ‘architecture’)
along the horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines of perspective” (Shevstova, 2007, p. 53) , as well as his use
of light, colour, shape and space. When viewing a Cezanne painting there is
something about it that stands out as bold and ‘real’; something which only the
imagination can capture. The same can be said of Wilson’s theatrical landscapes.
They bring the imagination into the real
world, they are like a vision that “leads the viewer in to the dreamland
of transitions, ambiguities, and correspondences…as in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, of which Wilson’s
theatre is often reminiscent” (Lehmann, 2006, p. 78) . An example of what
Lehmann is speaking about here can be seen in Wilson’s 2009 collaboration
with Rufus Wainwright and the Berliner Ensemble, Shakespeare’s Sonnets (fig 2, 3 & 4).
[fig 3: (Theater,
[fig 2: (Milestimulos, 2009) ] Gesehen 2009) ] [fig 4: (B.A.M., 2014) ]
[ 2009’s Shakespeare’s
Sonnets. Three different scenes showing the contrast
between transitions and the different worlds created.]
between transitions and the different worlds created.]
Another
artist that has influenced Wilson’s works is the American Abstract
Expressionist Barnett Newman who used minimalism “with his glowing rods and
expanses of colour for which Wilson has found the equivalent, with light, for
the stage” (Shevstova, 2007, p. 16) . This aspect of his
stage design can be seen clearly in his 1998 production of Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin (McGraph, 1998) .
Wilson worked
with the autistic Christopher Knowles, and found him highly inspirational.
Wilson wanted to explore the way Knowles perceived, interpreted and
communicated with the world. Knowles “way of disassociating sounds, words and
sentences from conventional sense
and making chains and variations of them
provided Wilson with a model for 1974’s A
Letter For Queen Victoria” (Shevstova, 2007, p. 11) . Here Wilson ‘dramatizes’
the language problem. The problem being what is language? What does it
communicate? What can’t it communicate? What illusions does it carry? Wilson
and Knowles really start to interrogate language, deconstruct it, and express it visually on stage (Holmberg,
1998, pp. 43-45) .
Wilson’s
1970 ‘silent opera’ Deafman Glance was made in collaboration with a deaf boy
whom he adopted named Raymond Andrews. Andrews had never been able to hear and
Wilson discovered that he was “Intelligent, highly intelligent, but he thinks
in a different way…his body is attuned to vibration. His body was hearing”
(Haven, 2008). Andrews had made up his own sign systems of images, colours,
gestures, and movements. In Deafman
Glance the whole stage is utilised and there are no fixed points of
reference, (except, arguably, the gaze of Raymond Andrews) only movement in the
space and time that it is in.
Louis Aragon,
a French surrealist novelist, after seeing Deafman
Glance, wrote a now famous letter to his dead friend Andre Breton,
author of the Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, saying that “Bob Wilson is what we,
from whom surrealism was born, dreamed would come after us and go beyond
us…Wilson binds gestures and silence, movement and what cannot be heard”
(Shevstova, 2007, p. 9). This statement is indicative of Wilson’s theatre, and
the letter gives evidence of how Wilson’s vision and process began to inspire a
reimagining of the theatre.
The term
‘Wilsonian’ is something that has been embedded in art criticism from literary
journals to architecture magazines (Quadri, et al., 1998, p. 179) . Wilson has, with
the influence and energy of his predecessors and contemporaries, kept the ball
of artistic evolution rolling. He has also arguably, though inadvertently,
expressed many ideas that the great changers of theatre started to propose in
the twentieth century; like Edward Gordon Craig’s ubermarionette, Gertrude Stein’s landscape theatre, and Vsevolod Meyerhold’s Conditional Theatre.
It is true
that Wilson’s techniques are now “employed, at times, in a merely
craftsman-like, slightly mannerist fashion” (Lehmann, 2006, p. 77) . That, it seems, is inevitable.
But what we have now is a brilliant springboard for new plays and new theatre
to jump from. And there are examples of his influence reaching in to some
beautiful, and atmospheric, pieces of new performance, opera, and theatre.
Theatre and
opera director Robert Lepage’s stage design is influenced by Wilson’s (wgbh-news,
2012) .
Like Wilson he “promotes the idea that art needs to be free from the
constraints of industry and public expectation” (Dundjerovic,
2009, p. 42) .
And he cites Wilson, along with Peter Brook and Elizabeth LeCompte when talking
about being a director of performance (Dundjerovic, 2009)
(Eyre, 2011) . Puchdrunk’s style of immersive theatre is
stylistically designed to create a dark, surreal-like, affect in the audience. And
they use sound, dark, light and artistic flair to achieve their signature style (Punchdrunk.com,
2015) .
A new
production by the National Theatre called The
Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, also shows influence of
Wilson’s theatrical vision (fig 5). Curiously, the story’s protagonist is
Christopher, an autistic 15 year old boy. And in adapting the novel the
National Theatre took on some Wilsonian forms; the minimalist stage, the visual
expression of questioning the meanings of words and numbers, slow motion
tableaus, and the thoughtful and artistic use of light and movement. All it
takes is a change of light to transform the whole set in to a scene in space (Hitchings,
2013)
& (National Theatre, 2012) .
[Fig 5: Set design for The
Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time (Stone, 2013) ]
After Einstein on the Beach Wilson gained
world fame and attracted attention to his style of theatre from around the
world, especially Europe. And since then his reach has touched theatre all over
the world, particularly through collaboration with artists such as Heiner
Muller, Allen Ginsberg, Lou Reed, Lucinder Childs, Tom Waits, Marina Abromovic,
The Berliner Ensemble, Lady Gaga, and more. The lessons to be learned from his
process of theatre also raises awareness of our structures of perception, and
makes us ask questions of the strictures we keep in place for people who do not
see the world the way ‘normal’ people see it. Wilson said of Christopher
Knowles "what appeared to be arbitrary was not arbitrary at all—it was
extremely precise," an expression of his "private
kingdom"—rather, in fact, like a Wilson production (Haven, 2008) . Through studying
the ways in which Wilson changes and makes theatre, perhaps we can keep the ball
of artistic and social evolution rolling.
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