Robert Wilson returns to Texas

by Chepe Lockett

Robert Wilson, a noted avant-garde theater and visual artist, has been described in Time magazine as "the most famous director in all of Europe." He is also a native Texan, and will return home this summer for a double presentation of his works.

The Alley Theatre will present Wilson's production of Henrik Ibsen's play When We Dead Awaken at the Wortham Center from May 22 to 26, and the Contemporary Arts Museum (CAM) will display "Robert Wilson's Vision," a retrospective of his furniture/sculpture, drawings, videos, and installation works, opening June 15. Only one other city in the U.S. (Boston) has hosted both the production and the museum exhibit, so their appearance here has caused great excitement in the art world.

Wilson, says Alley Artistic Director Gregory Boyd, is "a rare thing...: he is, without question, an inspiration to all of us who live in the theater.... [His shows] have been exclamation points in my life as a theater-goer.... His visit is a coming of age for the Alley, and a milestone in the history of this company."

Robert Wilson first arrived in New York as an architecture and design student in the 1960's, where he soon became a presence in the Underground, and then an artist of international reputation. CAM director Suzanne Delehanty describes Wilson's art as "breaking down the boundaries between the plastic and performing arts," in the tradition of Picasso's ballet productions or the Bauhaus concept of unified painting, sculpture, architecture, and theater. Wilson's surreal, serious yet whimsical creations frequently have their origins in far-ranging historical research, from Napoleon's public works to Einstein's thoughts on plumbers, and have their influences in Japanese art, from puppet theater to choreography from no or kabuki.

Wilson's sculptures frequently take the form of furniture, and he frequently uses those pieces in theatrical productions. "He moves furniture around on stage almost as if they were actors" says Delehanty. Wilson agrees with the concept of furniture as character. Props are not decoration, but sculpture, and a chair, for example, makes a fine actor: it can force an audience to imagine what kind of character would sit there.

Robert Wilson himself spoke about his work in a press conference on the Alley Theatre's Main Stage last Monday. He describes his entire approach in the theater in terms of an exchange of dialogue in Wagner's Parsifalm which he recently directed for the Hamburg Stage Opera (and which comes to the Houston Grand Opera in February). After Parsifal has glimpsed the Holy Grail at the end of Act I, a character asks him "But what have you seen?" "I don't know," is the response. Says Wilson, "For me, this is the reason to be an artist. To ask a question. If we know why we do something, there's no need to do it."

This basic love for ambiguity appears also in When We Dead Awaken. Most theatrical productions today are naturalistic -- but not this. "I hate naturalism," says Wilson unabashedly, "Art is something that is artificial.... I've tried not to interpret. I'm disturbed by actors interpreting. I prefer a theater of questions. Interpretation is for the public, for the audience. I want to share an experience, and let them answer it if they want to."

Wilson's philosophy has led his production into something resembling a blend of Ibsen, one of the first advocates of theatrical naturalism, with modern performance art. An eerie "audio environment" by Hans Peter Kuhn (who collaborated with Wilson on the opera Einstein on the Beach) surrounds the play with disjointed sounds, for Wilson believes in equal and distinct visual and audial performances, in "putting the silent movie with the radio drama."

For the choreography, Wilson invented 380 separate movements for his main character, each identified by number, then rehearsed them in different combinations. His actors first learned their movements, then rehearsed When We Dead Awaken as a mute play, then at last worked the text with the movements. Wilson has divided one of the main female roles of the play, the spectral Irene, between two actresses, giving them different colors (one is white, one black), textures, and attitudes, and allowing them to talk and fight with one another. Wilson says of the split, "a spinning coin has one image, but two sides.... We're all made of many different people."

Concerned that the work was a very serious play, like much of Ibsen's work, Wilson parlayed a chance dinner meeting in New York with Tony Award winning tap dancer Charles "Honi" Coles into a series of "knee plays" -- short musical interludes of dances and blues songs composed and performed by Coles and a chorus line of Ibsen characters. "Robert Wilson is a brilliant artist," says Coles, "but the most imaginative thing he's ever done is to cast me in an Ibsen play!"

Challenged on his surreal interpretation of a supposedly naturalistic play, Wilson says his aim is "not to destroy Ibsen, but to enlarge it.... It's a work about death, about life, about love.... It's a play about art, about art in our life, and as artists how we work." Houstonians, artists and laypeople alike, will get the chance to peer into "Robert Wilson's Vision" this summer to evaluate it for themselves.