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Against the grain: At 65, artist and
visionary director Robert Wilson
continues to defy theatrical tradition
2006 Panache Privée Feature

by Marion Lignana Rosenberg

Out of the silence rises the shimmer of violins, ethereal yet alive with wonder, tracing a melody of sublime beauty. A soft bar of light ascends across a huge, empty stage, soon crossed by a hard, vertical light box that descends as the music grows richer and more complex, swelling to a rapturous climax before fading back into the stillness from which it arose.

Characters with masklike faces dressed in sculptural sheaths stand in hieratic poses or glide slowly across the stage, sometimes seeming to float. An immense, blood-red mass—a stage curtain unfurled slowly but inexorably—pursues the cool shades of blue, white and gray in a stately wedding procession.

These are some of the images in Wagner’s opera Lohengrin, as staged by visionary director and artist Robert Wilson. Wilson’s Lohengrin returns to the Metropolitan Opera this spring for six performances in April and May; days before, his production of Henrik Ibsen’s epic Peer Gynt receives its North American premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM).

At its opening night in 1998, Wilson’s Lohengrin earned one of the ugliest receptions in Met history. Playwright and critic Albert Innaurato wrote of “banshee shrieks of apparently homicidal intent aimed at the director,” though lusty cheers greeted the production when the Met revived it the following season. Reached by phone in Baden-Baden, Germany, where he was rehearsing Verdi’s Aida, the soft-spoken Wilson sighed when asked to recall the Lohengrin premiere.

“I think that, for the most part, we’re quite provincial in the United States. You’ve got some of the world’s greatest directors working right here in Europe, and their work is not known in the United States. By and large, the productions at the Met are still in the 19th century.” Wilson’s method of taking the production’s visual book as his starting point was perceived as “very radical” in New York, though he pointed out that his basic conceit—a frame that gradually shrinks to enclose Lohengrin and Elsa’s bridal chamber, then expands for the opera’s final, public scene—echoed Wagner’s original pen-and-ink sketches for Lohengrin.

Born in 1941 in Waco, TX, where he saw little theater while growing up, Wilson moved to New York in the 1960s. The mainstream Broadway shows and operas that he saw repelled him, but he began to have a sense of his vocation after experiencing the work of George Balanchine at the New York City Ballet and the collaborations of choreographer Merce Cunningham and composer John Cage.

“I liked it because it was classically constructed. It was presented formally—there was a certain distance between the performer and the spectator.” He says he found conventional theater “too complicated. The psychology, the ‘naturalism’ seemed to be based on a lie. To be on the stage, for me, is something that’s artificial, and if you think it’s ‘natural,’ then it always seems awkward, because it’s not,” he chuckles. “But if you accept it as being something artificial, then you can be more honest about what you’re trying to do.”

In addition to Balanchine and Cunningham, abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko also seems to have shaped Wilson’s work. Like Rothko’s most celebrated canvases, Wilson’s imagery typically weds fields of color radiating emotional, even spiritual, energy to compositions of rigorous strength. “I think that theater should be architectural—I hate this word ‘theater decoration,’” he remarks. “It should be ‘theatrical sets,’ which are architecture. Originally theater was architectural, and then it became… God knows what.”

Wilson’s impatience with the visual and gestural vocabulary to which many performers and viewers are accustomed may explain the resistance his work still inspires, some three decades after he shot to international fame with Einstein on the Beach, his landmark collaboration with composer Philip Glass. An understudy for the Met Lohengrin complained that the slow, ceremonial movements required by Wilson landed her in a chiropractor’s office. Earlier this year, tenor Plácido Domingo blamed an uncharacteristic spate of cancellations in part on the strain of singing Wagner’s Parsifal in Wilson’s Los Angeles Opera staging.

Nonetheless, other celebrated artists, including soprano Jessye Norman, seek out the director and commission work from him. (Domingo, too, in spite of his difficulties, professes “great admiration” for Wilson’s work.) And while some spectators find Wilson’s against-the-grain choreography distracting, he claims—with ample justification, in this writer’s view—that it serves the cause of music.

“Sometimes if the music is rushing very quickly, and you have a chorus of 120 people—if they are stepping on the beat of the music, it looks like a high school marching band. But if they’re walking against the music, and slower, then what I’m seeing creates a tension with what I’m hearing.”

Asked what he seeks to achieve through such tension, the gentlemanly Wilson shot back the only peremptory utterance of our conversation: “It helps you to hear the music better.” In his view, Wagner structured what Wilson calls “the audio book” along similar lines: “The orchestral part can be playing one thing, and one can be singing something different. That was quite radical.”

Wilson became interested in Wagner after hearing Herbert von Karajan conduct his works in the late 1970s. “It was his way of listening, his way of finding these nuances within the music. I liked his coldness—the way he placed emotion. He was a genius with the slow parts, which are the most difficult to do. How dangerous and alive they were! They were never sleepy, but full of tension.”

Wilson’s take on Wagner can be disconcerting for those who associate the master’s music with martial clatter and bombast. In fact, it recalls the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s observation that the composer was “our greatest musical miniaturist… The wealth of his colors, half-shadows, and twilight intimacies so pampers us that afterwards all other music seems too robust.” The Metropolitan Opera revival of Lohengrin—pairing Wilson’s dreamlike imagery with the playing of the Met orchestra, which mines the subtlest beauties in Wagner’s score—promises to reveal just such delicacies in this graceful opera.

Now in his seventh decade, Wilson remains as active as ever. He ticked off a fearsome list of recent and upcoming projects: plays starring French actresses Isabelle Huppert and Jeanne Moreau; Wagner’s Ring cycle and Puccini’s Madama Butterfly in Paris; and a Los Angeles revival of The Black Rider, his acclaimed music-theater collaboration with Beat poet William S. Burroughs and singer-songwriter Tom Waits.

Wilson’s elegant, light-filled installations for the Giorgio Armani retrospective, seen at New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 2001, travels to Shanghai this month.

He spoke with enthusiasm of the re-opening of the Watermill Center, the six-acre center for the study of the arts and humanities he founded in Southampton, New York, in 1992. One of the buildings on the site, now gutted and reconfigured as a workshop, conference and rehearsal center, was originally a Western Union factory where fax technology was developed.

“I liked it very much because it reminded me of the factory space I had in SoHo in the mid-1960s,” Wilson remarked. “I was looking for a place to go back to my roots and work in a space where I could invite other people to come and do their work, and where I could have collaborations—which is how my work started in the theater and in the visual arts.”

The revamped Watermill Center will be celebrated at a pre-opening benefit at Manhattan’s Stephan Weiss Studio in mid-April. The Grand Opening and Thirteenth Annual Summer Benefit will take place July 14–16 in Southampton. “We’re bringing back some of the artists’ work that was developed at the site, and they’re going to do site-specific installations.” The three-week summer institute for apprentices will include workshops for installations and theatrical productions, along with master classes led by longtime Wilson collaborators.

Plans for the opening also include highlights from the Watermill Art Collection curated by Jean-Paul Barbier-Mueller, and a project with local community members, including many very young people. “It could be anything, maybe a big dinner! We’ll start with a workshop this summer. It’s not a book that is already written; it’s a book that is empty, so that when we go to the workshop we can begin to fill in the pages.”

Robert Wilson’s enduring gusto and delight in discovery make it clear that many fascinating chapters remain to be written in the book that is his long and brilliant career.

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