Robert Wilson (83), one of the greatest visual and theater artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, has passed away. He was born in Waho (Texas), where, as he often emphasized, there was no theater. When he went to New York to study, he saw Broadway plays, but he didn't like them. And then he got acquainted with the art of opera, contemporary dance performances by Mars Cunningham and the compositions of John Cage. He was inspired by artists who think abstractly, and this opened the way for him to a completely new understanding of the relationship between theater performance, music, movement and light.
Words held him back.
He didn't care much for dramatic theater. It was too focused on words for him and neglected all other means of expression. He wanted total art, art that combines light, sound and movement. His goal was artistry in the sense of artistic skill and complete mastery of the technique and form of art. It is important to point out that his insistence on artistry occurs at a time when contemporary art rejects artistry in search of the rudimentary, authentic and uncontrolled.
He, on the contrary, insisted on artistry because artistry allowed him to reach his artistic expression far beyond words because our world is trapped in words that we use unwillingly and that become meaningless as a result. For Wilson, artistry was a way for the artist to completely surrender to art, animate all the senses and reach the viewer's being by pushing the actor's physical being and the viewer's endurance to the limit. His fantastic performances encouraged the viewer to jump over the limits of the mind imposed by speech and to experience art with all the senses.
Wilson on Bitef
We watched at Bitef Letter to Queen Victoria (1974) Einstein on the beach (1976) and Woyzeck (2002). Although Wilson's approach to the art of theater was radically different from what we saw on our stages, Belgrade critics and theater scholars wrote analytically about his work. Muharem Pervić is writing about the play Writing za Queen Victoria (Bitef 1974) wrote the following: "In his plays, Wilson tries to hear and not to understand, so his play follows the music, not the logic of events. This rhythmic-melodic form as a principle of construction is established by Wilson with a system of repetition, symmetry, intonation parallelisms, amplification and fitting of gestures and movements, typification of space, which transmits a certain rhythmic melodic gesture throughout the play, that is, it is rhythmically structured."
Great lecture.
It's a pity that we didn't see his performance at Bitef Hamlet machine based on the play by Heiner Müller (Hamburg and New York 1986), which is actually not a play in the strict sense but a collection of poetry and narration. Bob Wilson made the whole show so that the spoken words not only get the meaning but also the quality of the sound produced by the human voice transmitted through the speakers or unplugged. Hamlet machine it happened acoustically, with great clarity and plasticity with a lot of repetition, overlap and insertion.
During the war nineties, on September 30, 1995, Robert Bob Wilson held a great performance lecture in the Bitef Theater during the Bitef Festival. It was an act of helping long-time friends in need and a very important experience for a generation of theater artists who had the misfortune of being educated and trained professionally under sanctions and war operations.
On the surface, everything was simple, yet so magical. Wilson told us about his life journey, about his plays and why he had to create the kind of plays he did. We watched and listened to him breathlessly. He moved around the stage like a kind of ballet dancer, said very serious things like the best stand-up comedian and expressed the deepest aesthetic philosophy in words that anyone could understand. I remember his lecture as the most beautiful event of that Bitef. Deeply aware of the importance of this lecture, Felix Pašić and the editor of LUDUS at the time (issue 30, October 5, 1995) published lecture transcript. Thanks to Jovan Ćirilov for bringing him and thanks to Robert Wilson for coming to us at a time when we were ostracized from the world. Thanks to him and eternal glory!
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