Robert Wilson

Abstract

Robert Wilson is the supreme example of director as scenic writer. He draws on a wide variety of artistic sources, from symbolism to the visionary architecture of the late twentieth century, from surrealist dream imagery to post-modern choreography and the perceptual modes of so-called ‘maladjusted’ children. He is unique in his uncompromising fidelity to the realisation of his own visions in performance, fuelled by a quasi-mystical belief in the therapeutic power of art as a stimulus to the individual imagination. He takes his place in the tradition of visionary mystics and romantic innovators of the last 150 years that has its origins in the ‘music drama’ of Richard Wagner and subsequently in the theories of Edward Gordon Craig. Wagner’s principle theoretical legacy is the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk: a synthesis of disparate art forms — dance and movement, light, design, music — into a total work of art. Wilson’s major work, from Deafman Glance (1971) to the monumental but ill-fated CIVIL warS fifteen years later, may be seen as an attempt to realise a Gesamtkunstwerk of and for our times.