Images in the Interstice: The Phenomenal Theater of Robert Wilson

Abstract

Two decades of startlingly beautiful oneiric landscapes, elaborately calibrated lighting plots and multi—scrirnmed stage settings have not detracted from Robert Wilson's reputation as America's foremost experimenter in avant—garde drama. His reputation dates at least from the Paris production of his Deafman Glance at the Theatre de la Musique, June 1971. On that date — or shortly thereafter — Louis Aragon addressed a posthumous letter to Andre Breton, in praise of Robert Wilson's creation. The spectacle of Aragon's calculated public advertisement, proclaiming Wilson as the true heir to the surrealist revolutions of the 1920s, was published in Les Lettres Francaises. The movement that had faded in the 1930s with Breton's espousal of Marxism, and had lain quiescent for three decades, was reborn (in Aragon's eyes at least) in the collaborative works of Wilson, a trained architect who expanded the limits of the communicative act in the theater.