Роберт Уилсон: Авангардист американского театра

American stage director and playwright (born 1941)

Robert Wilson (born October 4, 1941) is an American experimental theater stage director and playwright who has been described by The New York Times as "[America]'s – or even the world's – foremost vanguard 'theater artist. He has also worked as a choreographer, performer, painter, sculptor, video artist, and sound and lighting designer. Wilson is best known for his collaboration with Philip Glass and Lucinda Childs on Einstein on the Beach, and his frequent collaborations with Tom Waits. In 1991, Wilson established The Watermill Center, "a laboratory for performance" on the East End of Long Island, New York, regularly working with opera and theater companies, as well as cultural festivals. Wilson "has developed as an avant garde artist specifically in Europe amongst its modern quests, in its most significant cultural centers, galleries, museums, opera houses and theaters, and festivals".

Wilson was born in Waco, Texas, the son of Loree Velma (née Hamilton) and D. M. Wilson, a lawyer. He had a difficult youth as the gay son of a conservative family. "When I was growing up, it was a sin to go to the theater. It was a sin if a woman wore pants. There was a prayer box in school, and if you saw someone sinning you could put their name in the prayer box, and on Fridays everyone would pray for those people whose names were in the prayer box." He was stuttering and taken to a local dance instructor called Bird "Baby" Hoffman, who helped him overcome his stutter. 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 to change fields, study art and architecture. At some point he went to Arizona to study architecture with Paolo Soleri at his desert complex. Wilson found himself drawn to the work of pioneering choreographers George Balanchine, Merce Cunningham, and Martha Graham, among others. He engaged in therapeutic theater work with brain injured and disabled children in New York. He received a BFA in architecture from the Pratt Institute in 1965. He directed a "ballet for iron lung patients where the participants moved a fluorescent streamer with their mouths while the janitor danced dressed as Miss America". In 1970, Wilson and a group of collaborators, including choreographer Andy deGroat and the dancer and actor Sheryl Sutton, devised the "silent opera" Deafman Glance in Iowa City, where it premiered at the Center for New Performing Arts on December 15. The large cast of the premiere production of Deafman Glance included Raymond Andrews and Ana Mendieta. The show subsequently traveled to the Nancy Festival in France and to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It later opened in Paris, championed by the designer Pierre Cardin. In 1975, Wilson dissolved the Byrds and started to use professional actors. 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. In 1998, Wilson staged August Strindberg's A Dream Play, at Stockholms Stadsteater, Sweden. It later headlined festivals in Recklinghausen, Nice, Perth, Bonn, Moscow, New York and London. 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 John Cage's Lecture on Nothing, which was commissioned for a celebration of the Cage centenary at the 2012 Ruhrtriennale, had its U. S. premiere in Royce Hall, UCLA, by the Center for the Art of Performance. Wilson performed Lectures on Nothing in its Australian premiere at the 2019 Supersense festival at the Arts Centre Melbourne. 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 monolog. Since 1999, Wilson has premiered nine theatrical works in Berlin. By contrast, as of 2013, his last commission in the United States was 21 years ago. As of 2010, he continued to direct revivals of his most celebrated productions, including The Black Rider in London, San Francisco, Sydney, Australia, and Los Angeles; The Temptation of St. Anthony in New York and Barcelona; Erwartung in Berlin; Madama Butterfly at the Bolshoi Opera in Moscow; and Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen at Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. Wilson also directs all Monteverdi operas for the opera houses of La Scala in Milan and the Palais Garnier in Paris. In 2021 Wilson directed a revival of Shakespeare's The Tempest at the Ivan Vazov National Theatre in Sofia, Bulgaria. In 2022 he directed UBU, a theatrical performance, premiered at Es Baluard Museu in Palma.

In addition to his work for the stage, Wilson has created sculpture, drawings, and furniture designs. Exhibited in December 1976 at the Paula Cooper Gallery, Wilson's storyboards were described by one critic as "serial art, equivalent to the slow motion tempo of [Wilson's] theatrical style. In drawing after drawing after drawing, a detail is proposed, analyzed, refined, redefined, moved through various positions." He won the Golden Lion at the 1993 Venice Biennale for a sculptural installation. In 2004, Ali Hossaini offered Wilson a residency at the television channel LAB HD. Since then Wilson, with producer Esther Gordon and later with Matthew Shattuck, has produced dozens of high definition videos known as the Voom Portraits. Collaborators on this well received project included the composer Michael Galasso, the late artist and designer Eugene Tsai, fashion designer Kevin Santos, and lighting designer Urs Schönebaum. In addition to celebrity subjects, sitters have included royalty, animals, Nobel Prize winners and hobos. In 2011, Wilson designed an art park dedicated to the Finnish designer Tapio Wirkkala (1915–1985), situated in the Arabianranta district of Helsinki. His plans for the rectangular park feature a central square divided into nine equally sized fields separated by bushes. Each field will be installed with objects related to the home. For example, one unit will consist of a small fireplace surrounded by stones that serve as seating. The park will be lit by large, lightbox style lamps build into the ground and by smaller ones modeled on ordinary floor lamps. In 2013 American pop singer Lady Gaga announced that she would collaborate with Wilson as part of her ARTPOP project. He subsequently designed the set for her 2013 MTV Video Music Awards performance. Wilson also suggested that Gaga pose for his Voom Portraits. The centerpiece of the residency is a room filled with objects from the artist's personal collection in New York, including African masks, a Shaker chair, ancient Chinese ceramics, shoes worn by Marlene Dietrich and a photo of Wilson and Glass taken in the early 1980s by Robert Mapplethorpe. For many years he was romantically involved with Andy de Groat, a dancer and choreographer with whom he collaborated in the 1970s.

Wilson is known for pushing the boundaries of theater. 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.