Robert Wilson, the acclaimed theater director, playwright, choreographer and visual artist who mounted wildly imaginative stagings of his own works — including collaborations with Philip Glass, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Lady Gaga — as well as contemporary operas and classic plays from the standard repertory, died on Thursday at his home in Water Mill, N.Y. He was 83.
His death was confirmed by Chris Green, the executor of his estate and the president of the Robert Wilson Arts Foundation. He did not specify the cause, saying only that Mr. Wilson died after a brief illness.
Tall, soft-spoken and a conservative dresser, Mr. Wilson looked more like an accountant than an avant-gardist with a long résumé of provocative productions. But there was nothing conventional about his sense of the stage. He often said that he was less interested in dialogue and a narrative arc than in the interaction of light, space and movement, and that even when he watched television, he turned the sound off.
Early in his career, Mr. Wilson established a working method in which new pieces would begin not with lines of text but with richly detailed visual images, which he would either draw or describe in detail in a 9-by-12 ledger he carried with him.
“I’ve had the idea for a long time of a room with lots of books, all placed neatly on shelves, and something slicing through the shelves,” was how he described his startling vision for his 1977 theater piece “I Was Sitting on My Patio This Guy Appeared I Thought I Was Hallucinating.” In an interview with The New York Times shortly before its premiere, he went on: “There is a telephone, and a telephone wire. There is a scrim or gauze over the front of the stage, and images are sometimes projected on it.” (In its subsequent review, The Times took note of the work’s “monstrous title.”)
Dialogue would find its way into the ledger later in the process. It might be fragmentary and repetitious — or there might be none at all. The seven-hour “Deafman Glance (Le Regard du Sourd),” from 1971, and the 12-hour “Life and Times of Joseph Stalin,” from 1973, were entirely silent.
Even when directing Shakespeare, Mr. Wilson sometimes had his actors distort the rhythms of the dialogue to suggest new meanings. Other times he trimmed the text radically, as he did in a 1990 production of “King Lear” in Frankfurt, Germany.
Time was an important element for Mr. Wilson, too. Where playwrights traditionally compressed time in their works, Mr. Wilson expanded it. His stage work “KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE,” which had its premiere in 1972 at the Festival of Arts in Shiraz, Iran, ran 168 hours and was presented over 10 days. Viewers were astonished and outraged to see actors taking hours to complete actions as simple as walking across the stage, or slicing an onion.
“To see someone try to act natural onstage seems so artificial,” he told The Times in 2021. “If you accept it as being something artificial, in the long run, it seems more natural, for me.”
By contrast, Mr. Wilson’s first foray into opera, and his first collaboration with Mr. Glass, “ (1976), is a comparatively trim five-hour work. It has no plot, but its tableaux touches on nuclear power, space travel and even Einstein’s love of playing the violin. And while it has plenty of text — counting sequences, solfège syllables, the lyrics to the pop song “Mr. Bojangles” and sections of poetry and prose by Christopher Knowles, Samuel M. Johnson and Lucinda Childs — none of it is dialogue. The audience, which is free to leave and return during a performance, is presented ideas about Einstein by inference and metaphor rather than directly.
Robert Wilson was born in Waco, Texas, on Oct. 4, 1941, to Diguid Mim Wilson Jr., a lawyer, and Velma Loree (Hamilton) Wilson, a homemaker. Because he had a stammer as a child, his parents sent him to study dance in the hope of building his confidence. His teacher, Byrd Hoffman, noticed that the boy’s problem was that he was trying to speak too quickly, and words were colliding. She taught him to slow down and focus his thought processes, and he overcame his impediment, although he later used the halting patterns and repetition of his childhood stammer as an element in his work.
“Byrd Hoffman was in her 70s when I first met her,” Mr. Wilson told the website Theater Art Life in 2020. “She taught me dance, and she understood the body in a remarkable way. She talked to me about the energy in my body. About relaxing. About letting my energy flow through.”
A complete obituary will appear soon.
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