“It Is All the Same Hand”: Robert Wilson (4 October 1941- 31 July 2025)
Maria Shevtsova*
Robert Wilson passed away peacefully and, although we knew he was not well, his death was unexpected, devastating, as must always be for those who love whom they have lost. A whole era so confidently generated during the 1960s seems to have ended with him. He will be deeply mourned across the world, especially in the many countries in which he worked, usually, but not exclusively, on stage productions. These were performed in local languages and toured in them abroad, opera excepted since it is generally sung internationally from its original libretto. The sheer volume, variety, and scope of Wilson’s artistic output and its wide reach and audience range have made him a truly global figure. This status is not a rarity for commercial musicals or the pop spheres of such celebrities as David Byrne and Lady Gaga, with whom he has collaborated, but it is rare in the theatre.
Grief is grief – no words can get around it – but Wilson’s monumental legacy is cause for celebration and acknowledgment of his fearless use of the word “art” for his work in a twenty-first century wary of imputed hierarchical distinctions. He did not follow conventions assumed to be “right” for the theatre but crossed over freely into the visual, sonic and corporeal arts – the latter predominantly dance, movement and mime. Mime, in his case, was essentially mimicry, frozen momentarily in sharp, highly articulated facial images exaggerated by heavy make-up and framed by zany wigs; the effect was one of something fantastic, contrived and stylised rather than real or realistic. By incisive means like these, he mixed, calibrated, and juxtaposed the elements available across the arts to create both new forms and his singular idioms. Verbal art, written, spoken, and sung, belonged to this process.
During the early 1980s, Wilson occasionally but reluctantly referred to his constructions as “hybrids,” soon preferring no term at all to proscriptive labels. But, with this interrelational practice, he opened questions for theatremakers about what theatre could become, believing as well that theatre was an integral part of being human in the diverse cultures, past and present, that constituted humanity. He was an ardent collector of artefacts from ancient civilizations; loved classical music; enjoyed working with rigorously trained actors whose mastery he moulded to his aesthetic. He believed that theatre, when breaking compositional boundaries, loosened societal barriers – a view that was not so much politically motivated as ethical and humanitarian. It was from this overall comprehensive standpoint that Wilson founded in 1992 The Watermill Center in Long Island, near New York City. It was not until 2006 that Watermill was completed, allowing it to be a fully functioning laboratory for exploration, experimentation, research and even some consolidation of its pluridisciplinary, multiracial, cross-arts activities in a cooperative spirit. Here, in a centre completely open to international participants, bigotry and prejudice of any kind were inadmissible. Watermill is, deservedly, a huge part of Wilson’s legacy.
Wilson embodied Watermill’s project in his own abilities. He was a theatre and opera director and his own light designer and scenographer, also designing costumes and objects in his early years. The iconic example is his chair for Deafman Glance (1970), which took the time of the whole performance to descend from the flies. Deafman Glance travelled in 1971 to the Nancy Festival in France, making a strong enough impression to be invited from there to Paris, where it earned the surrealist writer Louis Aragon’s immortal praise and his exquisitely accurate description of the work as “silent opera.” And it was silent (except for natural sounds like footsteps) for seven hours in Paris (four in Iowa, its first run), where Wilson had added sizeable sections from The Life and Times of Sigmunt Freud (1969), devised with the Byrd Hoffman School of Birds. He had established this communal group in 1967 and was to dissolve it in 1975.
Deafman Glance was arranged spatially and visually on planes. Images seemed alienated, as in surrealist paintings. Silence, slowness, and stillness reigned – illusory stillness, since it contained motion, however slight. These would become core characteristics of Wilson’s entire theatre aesthetic, as would meticulous spatial organization for a work’s structure (Wilson called it “architecture”) and the play of light that contoured image and colour. His signature lighting design, both sophisticated and subtle, only came after the essentially white-lit, grey and multitoned-beige Einstein on the Beach (1976, Avignon Festival), which rocketed Wilson to expansive international fame.
Einstein was also significant entrepreneurially speaking. Generously financed by the French Ministry of Culture, this example triggered broader European ministerial support through subsidised National and other state theatres in which the great Opera Houses figured considerably. Germany, like France – Italy too was present at the start – ensured, after Berlin’s 1979 Death, Destruction and Detroit, successive productions like the Cologne section of the CIVIL warS (1984) and the boldly humorous, evocative of expressionistic cabaret and circus-show that was The Black Rider in Hambourg (1990); songs and music were by Tom Waits, some spoken texts by William Boroughs. German patronage continued faithfully, the last production being Moby Dick (2024) in Düsseldorf; Paris saw an outstanding reprise, gently modified, of Wilson’s Madama Butterfly in 2024 (commissioned and premiered by the Paris Opera in 1993) and, in the same year, a whimsical, crisply etched PESSOA – Since I’ve been me, premiered six months before in Florence.
In the meantime, Wilson’s calendar had featured Switzerland, Scandinavia, Greece, turning in the 2000s to former Eastern Europe, centred first on the legendry Berliner Ensemble where, among a cluster of remarkable productions, he crafted the slyly funny, sometimes brazenly satirical but always perfectly manicured Shakespeare’s Sonnets (2008) in high-camp style. Further east on the European continent saw Wilson directing in state theatres in Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Estonia, Lithuania and, not least, Russia, where his Pushkin’s Fairy Tales (2016) was accompanied by CocoRosie’s “freak folk” blasting from the music pit. Pushkin, the quintessence of classicism in poetry and prose, met newest-wave modernity in the clash and contradiction prized by Wilson. And this mode incorporated delightful images: the flash of a squirrel eating with chopsticks; a ghost of mother-bear slowly passing by in the darkening blue-lit shape of a woman; a long, curved stick balanced on her head intimated the rifle that had killed her. The aesthetics of heightened contrast had entered Pushkin’s magical universe together with the light touches that, for decades, had endeared him to his friends and spectators. Pushkin’s Fairy Tales is regularly performed in repertory in Moscow to this very day.
Contrast sometimes functioned between like phenomena. Take two tempests, one opening Shakespeare’s The Tempest in Sofia (2021), the first Wilson commission in Bulgaria, while the other appeared halfway through Moby Dick. The first tempest was a phenomenal sound composition, thrilling in its sonic build up, threatening to rush into the audience (but abruptly stopped). The second inverted the task as primarily visual composition, intertwining thick rings of dark cloud rolling on the stage floor. Bulgaria was a new arena, but Wilson had accepted state-endowed invitations further afield – Brazil and, afterwards, China. He made the ritual, utterly captivating, I La Galigo (2004), based on an Indonesian Creation epic with musicians and dancers brought together in Bali from the whole Indonesian archipelago. It premiered in Singapore, touring thereafter to Amsterdam, first among European cities to welcome the production, and then New York, Taipei, Jakarta, and Melbourne. Institutional networks, then, not only helped to disseminate Wilson’s art, but also strengthened his business and impresario resolve.
More identities defined Wilson. He was an actor from the very beginning, later performing three major monologues: Hamlet (1995), tightly abridged, in which he played all the parts; Krapp’s Last Tape (2009); and Lecture on Nothing (2012) by John Cage who, with Merce Cunningham, were formative influences. He was interested in words as utterances rather than as conduits of semantic meaning. This was connected to how he savoured the qualities of the human voice – pitch, timbre, intonation, rhythm – as sound-making instruments instead of interpretation of character, situation, and so on, typical of dramatic theatre. He was a writer and a dancer, collaborating over the decades with dancer and choreographer Lucinda Childs; and, when preparing a production, he sketched or painted his ideas, some subsequently exhibited in galleries to coincide with performance periods. The most striking but unfortunate example of coordination of this kind was between The Messiah (2020), Mozart’s arrangement of Handel’s eponymous work, and Wilson’s paintings, destined for Paris. The Covid pandemic shut the show down after three performances (closing it previously in Salzburg), and the exhibition followed suit. The Messiah resurfaced in Barcelona (2024) in all its joyousness, with the magnificent jetés of Alexis Fousekis as abstractions of joy.
Wilson, architect by training, had designed the Watermill buildings and gardens, landscaping gardens elsewhere, as well. He loved glassware for its combination of light with weight, connecting, in the early 1990s, with Italian master glass makers and eventually showing pieces approved by them. Most important was his 2024 collection of small figurines titled Wrestlers, inspired by an ancient Chinese practice of the Han dynasty that Wilson took to be dance-wrestling. Each piece captured a different moment of his envisioned sequences. Wrestlers was made and exhibited on the island of Murano in Venice, home of glass of the highest order.
On a bigger physical scale came Wilson’s installations, among them a sound installation, Gloria, for the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris (2022). A sound and visual installation, STAR and STONE: a kind of love…some say, followed (2024). The site was Notre Dame Cathedral in Rouen, its facade digitally lit from the ground at different speeds in differing colours. A group of black and white images of destruction dramatically intervened in the chromatic flow, recalling the bombing of the Cathedral during the Second World War. Wilson used such visual apposition throughout his theatre. He would most certainly have remembered Claude Monet’s paintings of the Cathedral’s façade, stimulated also by the fact that the premiere of his event was arranged to coincide with the closing day of the Impressionist Normandy Festival, which evoked Monet’s lifelong attachment to Normandy. Given the occasion as well as Wilson’s fondness for ellipses, he was quite likely in dialogue with Monet, through his digital “paintings,” about what art might be today.
Wilson’s 2003 stunning installation in London exhibiting 400 Giorgio Armani garments, had provoked this very question, Wilson, from his vantage point, through his deftly conceived groupings, each with its own atmosphere while the whole uncannily became drama by the time viewers had walked to its end. The question had already been raised quite vociferously in 2000, when the Gugenheim Museum in New York hosted this installation and encountered criticism for having opened its modern-art doors to fashion.
Another visual-art facet emerged in the first years of the twenty-first century. Wilson began to draw playful video portraits on a High-Density screen, focusing, in the first instance, on actor celebrities – Brad Pitt (2004), Isabelle Huppert, Willem Dafoe but also dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, the latter two performing with slapstick fun Wilson’s The Old Woman (2012) by surrealist-absurdist playwright Daniil Kharms. Huppert excelled in two verbally dense solos under Wilson’s direction: Orlando (1993) and Mary Said What She Said (2019 in which Huppert’s vocal virtuosity steered Mary Queen of Scots’ reflections before her execution by her cousin Eizabeth I of England.
Wilson created some 60 video portraits, all theatricalised by their postures, gestures, costumes, and make-up. A variant of these “living portraits” (Wilson speaking) was created on Lady Gaga for exhibition at the Louvre in Paris in 2013. He transformed Lady Gaga’s likeness into the likeness of selected portraits of priceless paintings in the Museum – Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat, for instance. Details of clothing were slightly modified after the first image, but David’s atmosphere was retained. Only once has Wilson used his portraiture in a stage production, and this was in Lecture on Nothing. Amid scribbled walls and scrunched up papers strewn on the floor, a portrait of the Russian Constructivist Alexander Rodchenko suddenly appeared in an upper corner of the stage and winked at the audience (who gasped)! This Wilsonian bit of mischief was a veritable coup de théâtre.
All in all, Wilson’s artwork and Wilson’s theatre give and take from each other, illuminating both: they come, using his phrases, “from the same hand” and “the same thought.” His is decidedly not a theatre of representation or interpretation but one of display – a theatre of presentation in its purest form. Presentation, in this sense, is primarily a matter of form for which Wilson scrupulously guides his actors down to the smallest detail, like the crook of a finger or a head slightly moved. Fundamentally, Wilson works to a given pattern, like giving a dancer the steps of an existing choreography and asking the dancer to dance them (intrinsic to the transmission of classical choreography worldwide). The key to the dancing, however, is in how the dancer appropriates the steps, personalising them so that the steps are executed with intention, fully there, fully present, and precise, which is why they cannot be rendered mechanically. This in a body-centred, concentrated approach is what Wilson means when he speaks to actors of “filling the form.” “Filling” means the actor goes within, feeling, thinking, dreaming – whatever comes – and, in this way, appropriates the form, imbuing it with what in dance is called “quality” (of movement). “Filling” is not a matter of surface expression or showy or empty gesticulation, but of inward experiencing that gives the form tone, silhouette and meaningfulness.
Wilson’s single-minded attention to form does not mean that his productions are cold, thus incapable of holding emotions or arousing emotions in actors and spectators. Emotions are certainly present, but they are contained, more like an undercurrent than visible, not played ostentatiously, or forced or fake, unless for comic purposes. They are displaced, moved away from the actor (since Wilson’s is not psychological theatre) to the means of light, colour, and shape, as eloquently happens in Woyzeck (2000). Here, an immense red ellipsis, a half circle that looks like the eclipse of the sun, turns into deep brown and then black. Offset against this image is a black, flat human shape, Woyzeck, in melancholia/madness (as Georg Büchner conveys in words). A broad, flat triangular knife held downwards towards Marie’s illuminated torso is stilled, implying rather than representing his action. Marie is elegantly placed, motionless, on the floor; only her shoulders are slightly lifted – a dancer holding her pose with her abdomen. Everything here operates by allusion and association, and everything stirs palpable emotion among spectators, activated, too, by Tom Waites’ gravelly voice singing his bitter-sweet music of love and loss (“Blood Money”).
Nothing in this scene is for the reasoning mind. Analytical apperception only comes after the event, as always in Wilson’s oeuvre. It is the senses and sensations that are operative during performance, drawing on the imagination, the subconscious, insight and intuition. These are the driving forces of Wilson’s work, and these are the powerful instruments of his work on grand opera, yielding 26 productions. Among them are some of his most outstanding pieces: operas beautifully conceived, coordinated, and delivered from the inside by exceptional singer-actors who closely follow what the music tells them. These great performers deeply feel their music, and their profound feelings fill their voices no matter how still, how abstracted, how distanced or displaced their outer physical state may be.
After his silent opera, Wilson used music everywhere, fashioning within his repertoire his unique music theatre – The Black Rider, Woyzeck, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets at its summit. Even so, grand opera far outnumbers this “folk-rock” group (my description) combined with Wilson-staged baroque operas (notably Monteverdi). Which goes to say that Wilson is well and truly an opera director. He has occasionally mounted the moderns – Debussy, Stravinsky, Bartok, Virgil Thomson (libretto by Gertrude Stein) – but the largest part of his opera directing is grande Italian, Verdi and Puccini.
Three especially stand out from relatively recent years: Madama Butterfly, La Traviata (Linz 2015, Perm edition 2016, suite to Luxembourg, 2018), and Turandot (2018, Madrid). Madama Butterfly was an instant success in its Paris premiere not only for its novel presentational style but also for the daring travesti of its chorus (Butterfly’s retinue); queer too because of its geometrically assembled stiff dresses, accentuated geometric body shapes, and pronounced make-up, lipstick included. Wilson’s countless shades of blue, continually shifting on his palette-stage, were channels for emotion, firmly held, however, to avoid possible melodrama.
The 2024 edition was a recasting of perception. The retinue was reduced by roughly half (my calculation) and was visually more discrete, thus directing the focus of attention to Butterfly and, crucially, on the soprano’s singing. Eleanora Buratto goes inwards during Butterfly’s (over famous) aria of conviction that her lover will return, sustaining its force right through Butterfy’s night vigil, expecting him. Virtually motionless, Buratto’s concentration goes outwards with her voice with such finesse in her vocal colouring and such clarity of purpose – waiting in faith – that Christopher Maltman in the role of Pinkerton interacts with her with the greatest empathy, palpable but restrained. Empathy is by no means a Wilson trait and not sought by his aesthetic. However, brought about and experienced like this, it entered Wilson’s aesthetic without question.
Comparable to such artistic integrity was Nadezhda Pavlova’s rendition of Violetta in La Traviata. Wilson ‘s last scene shows Violetta, as if already a skeleton, rising from her bed, trailing a vast white sheet that looks like an unfurling lifted sail of a ship attached to her small finger. Pavlova moves almost imperceptibly but her voice rises and soars as she sings Violetta’s love for Alfredo, while conductor Teodor Currentzis and his orchestra MusicAeterna play and breathe completely with her, giving her free rein, as, indeed, did Wilson. It was electrifying: a spiritual journey and a tragic dimension unique in Wilson’s oeuvre.
Turandot, linked to La Traviata by intensity but without the demands of tragedy, is more elaborate, more sumptuous than its predecessors in every respect. Vibrating masses of purple, orange, chocolate signalled changes of scene, plot, story, and mood. Walls of black and tall columns moved. Turandot appeared high above the stage on a narrow black platform that entered from the wings, returning there three times after she poses each riddle to her final suitor, Caleb. Wilson’s spatial image of distance, aloofness, and dominance visualises the opera’s prevailing tension: Turandot – defined by this image – asking impossible questions, and Caleb answering correctly. She – impassive, he – imperturbable. The tale, as it plays out on the stage, indicates that Caleb knows the power of love; Turandot grows to love. Once again, the singing and the music carry the opera’s emotional charge, and Wilson’s scenographical and directorial leads concur, differently, in honour of love.
How happy I was, dear, dear, Bob, that, after two unrealised proposals years ago, you were finally working on Tristan and Isolde, Wagner’s ecstatic ode to love, for 2026, in which a ship’s sail of death also passes.
*Maria Shevtsova, distinguished scholar and teacher, is Professor Emerita of Goldsmiths University of London and Editor for 25 years of New Theatre Quarterly (Cambridge University Press), celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2024. Books include Dodin and the Maly Drama Theatre (2004), Robert Wilson (2007, second updated edition 2019), Sociology of Theatre and Performance (2009), and Rediscovering Stanislavsky (2020). Her books, key articles from 160, and chapters of collected volumes have been translated into 16 languages. She has taught in world universities in four languages, has held leadership positions in professional associations (FIRT/IFTR, ISA), is a theatre festival programme advisor and a multimedia speaker, writes programme notes for theatres, and continues her commitment to outreach work.
Copyright © 2025 Maria Shevtsova
Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, #32, December 2025
e-ISSN: 2409-7411
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Creative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
