Director Bob Wilson, artist of light and simplicity, dies at 83

Robert M. Wilson, known to everyone simply as Bob Wilson, died Thursday at the age of 83, his family announced. A director with such a distinctive style, his work left its mark on both theater and opera, the great classics and more contemporary authors. He died peacefully Thursday, July 31, at the age of 83 after a brief but serious illness, according to the Arts Center he founded in Watermill, New York.

Robert Wilson is an ocean. We don't really know how to cross it, we don't know which dock to dock at. If we refer to a famous encyclopedic website, under the "activities" section, here are the artist's activities - put on your life jacket: director, performer, videographer, painter, installation artist, filmmaker, screenwriter, choreographer, actor, architect, playwright, set designer, illustrator, lighting designer. Is the list exhaustive? No.

Also read Robert Wilson: “I owe a lot to France”

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Yes, this man is an ocean, so why not start in the most classic, the coldest, which would give roughly this: Robert - "Bob" for friends and some others - Wilson, one of the most eminent artists of theater and the visual arts, was born in Waco, October 4, 1941. After studying at the University of Texas and a training as a plastic artist in Brooklyn , Founded, in the mid-1960s, the collective byrd Hoffman School of byrds in New York and developed his first emblematic works whose gaze of the deaf (Deafman Glance, 1970) and a letter for Queen for Queen Victoria , 1974-1975).

With composer Philip Glass, he wrote the opera in 4 acts and nine Einstein on the Beach (1976). Why this strange title? Well, simply because he slams, that he does not mean much and that he is simply beautiful. A title as all the artists have dreamed of. The blue immensity of its stage funds, the hieratic, Japanese characters, have today become obligatory figures of the Western lyric theater. Bob Wilson does not back down in front of any audacity: from Strauss to Wagner, from Mozart to Gluck, from Puccini to Debussy.

Robert Wilson has collaborated with many writers such as Heiner Müller, Susan Sontag, William Burroughs and musicians such as Tom Waits, Lou Reed, David Byrne, Laurie Anderson, Jessye Norman or Anna Calvi. This should be enough to fill a life but it is only the emerged part of the Wilson ice floe. On the theater side, he will have marked his imprint of masterpieces such as the last Beckett band , the Brecht Quat'Sous opera , Faust de Goethe, the Odyssey of Homer, the Fables de la Fontaine and, of course William Shakespeare ...

Bob Wilson pushed the boundaries of theater in both space and time. For example, The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, which spanned 12 hours, is remembered, while KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDIAN TERRACE, which was staged on a mountaintop in Iran and lasted seven days, is remembered.

As a child, he said to himself that he wanted to be king of Spain. One thing is certain, he was stammered and he was a Waco dance teacher - a certain Bird "Baby" Hoffman - who helped him overcome his handicap. He has another: he is gay and being gay in Texas, at that time, this is a weakness that does not necessarily place you in pole position. Born in a conservative family, he therefore knew the powers of evil and insidious exclusions very early on. As for frequenting theaters, "it was a sin". "Bob" was badly gone but he will quickly have everything to please. So let's start with the famous look of the deaf , the founding spectacle of Wilson's career. Everything already seems in place.

“Bob, when you die, be buried in France!”

Michel Guy, Minister of Culture0

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The deaf look is therefore his first master stroke. Presented in 1971, at the Nancy Festival where it permanently marked the memories of spectators. This singular show installs Bob Wilson on the international scene. Aged just 27 years old, the young director, who frequents the New York avant-garde (La Judson Church, La Factory de Warhol), therefore creates the event: the show lasts seven hours and Aragon, in a posthumous letter to André Breton published in French letters, writes, that he has "nothing more beautiful in this world". Just that. From then on, Wilson's impact did not cease to spread. The list of artists who were marked by his art is not negligible: Patrice Chéreau, Roger Planchon, Georges Lavaudant, Carmelo Bene, to name a few. His visions are a real artistic revolution that allows Susan Sontag to say that Bob Wilson's career " carries the mark of a major artistic creation. I do not see any other work which is so vast or which has had as much influence ”. In fact, his work appears as one of the main mythologies of our time.

One of the keys to his art? Dance. Robert Wilson is more interested in the choreographies of George Balanchine or Merce Cunningham than by the theater. When he started, he also hopes that spectators see his creations as dance. More specifically, the image constitutes the starting point for his work. The term "images theater" which characterizes its aesthetics and which is experiencing a various fortune qualifying many shows and artists following it was created in particular for him (Bonnie Marranca, The Theatre of Images, 1977). One of the main features of its aesthetics is its way of conceiving time and space. From the gaze of the deaf , his shows stand out as moving paintings that play the stretching of time aimed at provoking an experience rather than telling a story. An experience of meditation (not in the religious sense) which encourages the interior visions and gives pride of place to imagination, leaving time in time, allowing the gesture to deploy, in the image of appearing and disappearing. There is something literally amazing in Wilson's shows. This principle is better understood when we know the project that presided over the creation of the deaf look. Speechless show, the latter wanted to explore the universe of a deaf child, Raymond Andrews, who "thought in images". Hence this dreamlike dimension which reigns in the gaze of the deaf, succession of living paintings operating on a logic of association of images which are however heterogeneous. The show is thus constructed by condensation and movement effects. The seventy actors present on the set are treated on the same plane as space, music, lights. Robert Wilson evacuates expressiveness in favor of the pure movement, demonstrating a distrust of any interpretative logic. The Deaf Man's Gaze can be read, in retrospect, as the manifesto of a creator whose entire work was marked by the requirement of theatrical research where aesthetic emotion is born from visual power.

As for opera, he staged, among others, Debussy's Pelléas et Mélissandre , Puccini's Madame Butterfly , Verdi's La Traviata . There is a particular breed of Wilsonian opera-maniacs . The silence, the beauty of the setting and the supreme and learned stillness of the characters have now entered into legend and France has a lot to do with it: "I love Paris. I love France," he explained to Le Figaro in 2019. "I am very grateful to France, because it is here that my work was understood. That was in 1971. Since then, obviously, it is not only in France that I have worked. But in the theater as well as in the opera, and even at the Louvre, I am in demand. I owe a lot to your country. And to the personalities who supported me. Michel Guy, in particular, who told me: 'Bob, when you die, be buried in France!'"

His personal style could only fascinate or irritate. His detractors are not tender, which is pretty good sign. This huge creator of images and colors will long continue to fascinate his aficionados. It is neither at the Odéon nor at the Athenaeus that Parisians appreciated - or not! - His last staging: it was at the theater of the city where he presented Pessoa, since the day , with, among others, Maria de Medeiros, and it was a kind of small miracle. Without much pretension. A short spectacle which paid on the side of the mime and which reminded us of the era of silent cinema. A story of words almost without words. Like Fernando Pessoa, "Bob" Wilson has known several faces. But who was Robert Wilson? Perhaps we find some clues in his references which come most often (he is wary of the theater) of painting (Paul Cézanne, Barnett Newman), music and song (John Cage, Marlene Dietrich), Dance (Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins without forgetting the cinema (Charlie Chaplin, Andy Warhol). No. finds thanks to his eyes - the elegant elegance of postures - but also the musical.