Seen by Robert Wilson
“Artists are recording our times, in the future this is what society will look back on as a record of our age… Responsibility as an artist is to not say what something is, but to ask what it is… There’s nothing wrong in having an interpretation, but we must not insist that it’s the whole truth.” Robert Wilson
The theatre of Robert Wilson is rooted in the visual arts. He creates a highly associative world, in which ideas and emotions are communicated non-linearly, outside the narrative structure of story. We may not know what his work means but it affects us. Pieces unfold like visual music where meaning is perceived subconsciously, on an “interior screen”, where we all share a universal language. This is where reality exists for Robert Wilson.
The Process
The conception of a piece is a process of building up layers, beginning with visual imagery, proceeding to stage movement, and later to costumes, words, music and scenic designs.
Wilson begins with a series of sketches in which he outlines the entire work. To these are added visual images from a variety of sources, along with texts and general ideas. The result is a “visual book” from which the entire production is built – not a script or a score, as in traditional theatre.
Wilson next develops patterns of movement emblematic of each character, fitting the characters together and refining the visual presentation. Each scene becomes a living painting. Wilson operates in the manner of a visual artist, adding the theatrical equivalents of colour, shading, and texture as he goes along. At the same time he develops ideas for stage properties, lighting, and costumes.
Like a tapestry woven together, visual and audio themes occur and recur, always the same, always different…
What is so compelling about Wilson is that he tries to banish the accidental from the stage. After sketching out the general rhythm and movement of the piece, Wilson studies each means of expression. Every movement – whether a nod of the head, a twitch of the hand, or a repositioning of the arm – is planned and staged. Every costume, every prop, every chair is designed specifically for the production, and placed with precision to make everything on the stage balance with the story being told.
Time
“I always work with a horizontal line, which stands for time, and a vertical line, which for me always means space. Time and space are two crossing lines, a structure that forms the architecture of everything. A painting by Vermeer, or the architecture of a painting by Barnett Newman, or a tiny piece of music by Mozart. In playing a piano, the finger presses down and up on a key and the sound goes out on a string. It is how you sit on a chair, how you stand on a stage, or how you speak. The cross is a basic structure.”
Words
The role of the artist is to question. Liberated from story, from text, from convention, from our obsession with reason… theatre brings up ideas that the audience can savour without necessarily understanding.
The idea that words are inherently more important than light, space, or movement is but one approach to theatre. Performance can live without words. Without story. It is not necessary to impose the intentional resolution of narrative on either text or character.
The French gave Deafman Glance the title Silent Opera when it premiered in Paris. But if Wilson’s work up until the mid-70s had no dialogue, it had started to make use of music and learning to talk. At that time, Wilson and his collaborators decomposed words into their basic elements. Syllables were explored like sub-atomic particles.
Using non-sequiturs, commonplace utterances, and sheer vocal sound, Wilson short circuits our desire for a single meaning and unleashes the limitless play of language. What interests him is the space between word and image. Though as a director Wilson has moved on to work with conventional theatre dialogue (including Ibsen and Büchner), he often returns to these earlier investigations.
Actors
The actor does not dominate the stage. A chair or a window is as important. In narrative theatre, emotion is elicited through empathy. The audience identifies with the characters on stage and feels for them as they weather the ups and downs of the plot. But Wilson has distanced himself from the naturalism and psychological viewpoint that has dominated Western theatre for the last two centuries…
…and entered a parallel world in which the strange picture, the juxtaposition of sound and light and set, inexplicably moves us, making us laugh or cry for no apparent “reason”.
Theatre can be seen as an architectural arrangement in time and space where the actor is an optional element. In this case, performers become added compositional elements. “A light moves or a prop moves and it’s timing, it’s a construction in time and space. And that is what I think is the architecture, the construction of anything, whether it’s Mozart or Wagner or Shakespeare.”
Movement
“I believe that in the theatre you can only be free when you are totally mechanical.” Robert Wilson
Movement is yet another layer of composition, yet another way to communicate ideas. It is stylised. Dance-like. Actions are slowed down, speeded up sometimes in a single sequence. Gestures and stage crosses are choreographed down to the slightest detail and counted out, as in ballet. In the rehearsal process actors are asked to repeat gestures so often that in the end the movements become mechanical.
While preparing A Letter for Queen Victoria, Wilson spent the first three weeks directing the actors. The rest of the rehearsal process involved running the piece over and over and over and over… until the actions and works became automatic. “Memory is a muscle.” With repetition, activities become instinctive. Actors can perform them without having to think about them. “The same way we ride a bicycle, technically.”
Light
Light is light. It does not have to be restricted to merely emphasising key actions or creating background atmosphere. Light can be an actor. In a minimalist decor (or even on an empty stage), light – through subtle movement and colour changes – communicates ideas… sensations… passions… time. The minimalism of the stage allows for ever more precise and elegant compositions: studies in geometry, as carefully composed for the eye as any painting. Wilson creates visions that bathe our conscious and subconscious minds in ephemeral waters on which we float to places we may not recognise until hours – or even days – after we have left the theatre. The uproar at the Metropolitan Opera over Wilson’s production of Lohengrin came from his replacing nearly all the traditional Wagnerian scenic elements with bars of pure light, whose slow and abstract movements provided the visual counterpoint to the arias.