Robert Wilson

Place: Waco

Born: 1941

Biography:

Robert Wilson is an American experimental theater stage director and playwright who has been described by the media as " 's – or even the world's – foremost avant-garde 'theater artist'". Over the course of his wide-ranging career, he has also worked as a choreographer, performer, painter, sculptor, video artist, and sound and lighting designer.
He is best known for his collaborations with Philip Glass on Einstein on the Beach, and with numerous other artists, including Heiner Müller, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Lou Reed, Tom Waits, David Byrne, Laurie Anderson, Gavin Bryars, Rufus Wainwright, Marina Abramović, Willem Dafoe, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Darryl Pinckney, Richard Gallo, and Lady Gaga. In 1991 Wilson established The Watermill Center, "a laboratory for performance" on the East End of Long Island, New York. He has received more commissions for new works in Europe than in the United States since the late 20th century, regularly working with opera and theatre companies, as well as cultural festivals.
Wilson was born in Waco, Texas, the son of Loree Velma (née Hamilton) and D.M. Wilson, a lawyer. After attending local schools, he studied business administration at the University of Texas from 1959 to 1962.
He moved to Brooklyn, New York in 1963 in order to change fields. He received a BFA in architecture from the Pratt Institute in 1966. During this period, he also attended lectures by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy (widow of László Moholy-Nagy), and studied painting with artist George McNeil. Later he went to Arizona to study architecture with Paolo Soleri at his desert complex.
After moving to New York, Wilson found himself drawn to the work of pioneering choreographers George Balanchine, Merce Cunningham, and Martha Graham, among others. In 1968, he founded an experimental performance company, the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds (named for a teacher who helped him overcome a severe stutter while a teenager). With this company, he directed his first major works, beginning with 1969's The King of Spain and The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud. He began to work in opera in the early 1970s, creating Einstein on the Beach with composer Philip Glass. This work brought the two artists worldwide renown. Following Einstein, Wilson worked increasingly with major European theaters and opera houses. For the New York debut of his first opera, the Metropolitan Opera allowed Wilson to rent the house on a Sunday, when they did not have a production, but would not produce the work. The house sold out in two days.
In 1972, Wilson's Deafman Glance, a long, silent play, was premiered at the Nancy Festival in France. It later opened in Paris, championed by the designer Pierre Cardin. The Surrealist poet Louis Aragon loved it and published a letter to the Surrealist poet André Breton (who had died in 1966), in which he praised Wilson as: "What we, from whom Surrealism was born, dreamed would come after us and go beyond us".
In 1983/84, Wilson planned a performance for the 1984 Summer Olympics, the CIVIL warS: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down; the complete work was to have been 12 hours long, in 6 parts. The production was only partially completed; the full event was cancelled by the Olympic Arts Festival, due to insufficient funds. In 1986, the Pulitzer Prize jury unanimously selected the CIVIL warS for the drama prize, but the supervisory board rejected the choice and gave no drama award that year.
In 1990 alone, Wilson created four new productions in four different West German cities: Shakespeare's King Lear in Frankfurt, Chekhov's Swan Song in Munich, an adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Orlando in West Berlin, and The Black Rider, a collaboration by Wilson, Tom Waits and William S. Burroughs, in Hamburg.
Wilson is known for pushing the boundaries of theatre. His works are noted for their austere style, very slow movement, and often extreme scale in space or in time. The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin was a 12-hour performance, while KA MOUNTain and GUARDenia Terrace was staged on a mountaintop in Iran and lasted seven days.
In 2010 Wilson was working on a new stage musical with composer (and long-time collaborator) Tom Waits and the Irish playwright, Martin McDonagh. His theatrical production of Lecture on Nothing, which was commissioned for a celebration of the John Cage centenary at the 2012 Ruhrtriennale, had its U.S. premiere in Royce Hall, UCLA, by the Center for the Art of Performance.
In 2013 Wilson, in collaboration with Mikhail Baryshnikov and co-starring Willem Dafoe, developed The Old Woman, an adaptation of the work by the Russian author Daniil Kharms. The play premiered at MIF13, Manchester International Festival. Wilson wrote that he and Baryshnikov had discussed creating a play together for years, perhaps based on a Russian text. The final production included dance, light, singing and bilingual monologue.

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