a cave, a pyramid, “two-dimensional trees and a three-dimensional house” are among the stage scenery; the menagerie includes four turtles with a pool on their backs, wooden fish that swim in it, a bull (beheaded during act 4), nine apes, and twenty dancing ostriches. Yet the huge size of the stage and the unimaginably long duration of the performance dwarf the props, performers, and action, and virtually every activity seems to take place in slow motion. The witness, partly lulled by the slow pace and absence of dramatic intensification, and partly prompted by its uniqueness to perceive everything with a new “vision,” eventually succumbs to the rhythms of the performance, coming away from the experience freed from stale habits of passive receptivity and reenergized by the aesthetic euphoria of visual stimulation.

The dialogue passages in this monumental retrospective point to a transition in Wilson’s work about this time. Earlier pieces (such as Deafman Glance) were essentially silent, with occasional songs, incomprehensible utterances, or sounds, but after the ambitious outdoor piece entitled Ka Mountain, GUARDenia Terrace, Wilson turned in another direction, marked by an increasingly concentrated examination of language as partial, failed, or desensitized communication. The spoken word, often in the form of seemingly meaningless phrases repeated and repeated, begins to draw the focus of the work. In stark contrast to the virtual silence of his early work, Wilson now exhaustively examined the nature of the word onstage.

A Letter for Queen Victoria

A Letter for Queen Victoria is the best illustration of this new concern. The “text,” edited by Bonnie Marranca with her introductory essay and a preface by Wilson, immediately identifies the nonnormative nature of Wilson’s language experiments during this period. Although the spoken word transliterates theoretically into the written word, no simple recitation of the “text” could reproduce the immediacy of the spoken performance, especially taking into account the participation of Christopher Knowles, a young man who shares authorship in the piece, clinically “autistic” but, according to Wilson, possessing perceptual powers different from but not inferior to normal perceptions. Knowles’s and Wilson’s “performance” of the phrases, neither linked nor “meaningful,” reduces the text to “architectonic” sounds that express the actors’ personal relationship in untranslatable ways.

From the backdrops of projected sound-words to the concrete layout of the poetry of the script page, Wilson’s main arena of theatrical inquiry during this period becomes the word, the script, and its tenuous relationship to the spoken aspect of theatrical experience. For example, a “press conference” in Yugoslavia consisted of Wilson’s repeating the word “dinosaur” for twelve hours while cutting an onion. A thwarted radio project called for actors to say “Hmm,” “O.K.,” and “There” for five hours. When a word is repeatedly uttered in this fashion, it loses its denotative meaning, resurfacing in the consciousness as pure sound, and, according to Wilson, helping to reestablish emotional responses which have been dulled by the everyday use of language. Wilson’s close association with Knowles, Raymond Andrews, and other children with limited hearing and speech has inspired him to experiment with language as “weather,” that is, as atmospheric pressures that alter accompanying movements and gestures, transforming them into highly subjective but effective personal communications.

The difficulties of “reading” a Wilson text should serve as a reminder: It is important to understand his work as performance art rather than primarily as literary expression. Although the “scripts” of Wilson’s works are sometimes available, often in obscure and out-of-print formats, the complexity and visuality of the experiences are best captured in the form of “performance documentation.” This genre, originating in such journals of experimental theater as The Drama Review and Performing Arts Journal, seeks to record nonscripted or partially scripted theatrical events by means of carefully detailed description of the nature, sequence, and duration of those events, told from the standpoint of a neutral, informed witness who avoids as much as is humanly possible any evaluative or subjective interpretations of those events. Necessarily, some interpretation is inevitable, but the reader can re-create, however imperfectly, some of the visual “semiotics” of the original performance. In Wilson’s case, the German critic Stefan Brecht has reported all the significant performance pieces of the Byrd Hoffman Studio up to 1978 in his exhaustively comprehensive study, The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson (1978), a title that is descriptive of Wilson’s whole aesthetic approach.

the CIVIL warS

After a very successful European tour of Einstein on the Beach (a collaboration with experimental music composer Philip Glass) in 1976, culminating in sold-out performances at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, Wilson found himself with increasingly complex production difficulties, brought on by his limitless vision and his refusal to compromise it with the petty realities of financial exigency. Forced to try smaller works such as I Was Sitting on My Patio This Guy Appeared I Thought I Was Hallucinating, Wilson seemed to be gathering his energy for his masterpiece, the CIVIL warS, a work that was to combine the most striking scenes and activities from earlier work with new visions on a grand scale. Yet after years of preparation in six countries and countless fund-raising trips and meetings, Wilson was forced to abandon his epic cycle, expressly designed in scope and theme for the Olympic Arts Festival in 1984. Efforts to mount it in Austin, Texas, in 1986 fell to financial realities as well; American audiences could only glimpse the tattered fragments of the Wagnerian vision in a tour of the diminutive Knee Plays, whose original purpose was to link the larger segments together.

Later Works

Perhaps the most prolific of contemporary directors, Wilson’s work in the 1990’s and 2000’s extends itself across geographic boundaries and continues to readdress the classics. His adaptations of classic works include Alice, Hamlet: A Monologue, Das Rheingold, and Woyzeck. His creative processes remain largely unchanged, although enhanced by the Watermill Center facility, where, in his own space, with his own company, he can first storyboard his productions and then choreograph the painstaking movements.