For decades, Robert Wilson staged plays and operas on the world’s most renowned stages. “I feel incredibly lucky,” he told the German press agency a few years ago.
In the early hours of Thursday, the renowned director died at age 83 at his Water Mill, New York home after a brief serious illness, confirmed Chris Green, president of the Robert Wilson Arts Foundation.
Collaborations with many stars
Wilson worked with acclaimed dramatists, poets, musicians, and actors such as Heiner Müller, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Tom Waits, Herbert Grönemeyer, and Marina Abramović, earning dozens of awards including the Federal Cross of Merit.
Wilson’s perhaps most famous work was the five-hour staging of the opera “Einstein on the Beach,” created in collaboration with Philip Glass. The director was regarded as the maker of brilliant stage dreamscapes.
Stage visionary with image theatre
To many, he was a master of distorting naturalism, simultaneously unsettling and captivating audiences with ritualistic slowness and a mystifying flow of images. Wilson’s largely abstract, minimalist yet deeply moving image theatre—always enhanced by striking lighting—was meticulously choreographed down to the last detail.
His preference for associative image theatre was often linked to a speech and behavioral disorder in his childhood.
Robert grew up as a shy, stuttering outsider in Texas, in the deep American South. His father, a conservative, devoutly religious lawyer, had little patience for the quiet boy. The mother met the boy coolly and distantly.
Only the dance therapist and ballet teacher Byrd Hoffman taught Wilson to absorb environmental impressions slowly and to take his time when speaking.
First study law, then art
After finishing school, he initially studied law, then switched to architecture and the arts and moved to New York. After coming out as gay and facing his father’s fury, he attempted to take his own life but was saved.
In the late 1960s, he founded the experimental theater group “Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds.” His first major success outside America came in 1971 with the seven-hour silent opera “Deafman Glance” staged in Paris. A work inspired by his Black deaf adopted son, Raymond Andrews. “Every great work must have something to do with the man on the street,” the director told The Guardian once.
On Long Island, Wilson ran the Art Foundation and ideas factory “Watermill Center,” where he also primarily supported the next generation of artists.
Otherwise, his calendar remained nearly fully booked, especially with productions on European stages, such as the Berliner Ensemble or the Thalia Theater in Hamburg. In 2022, he staged the queer play “Dorian” at the Düsseldorf Schauspielhaus (TheColu.mn reported). In Europe, people understood him and his art more readily than in his American homeland, Wilson often said.
