Robert Wilson, a leader in the avant-garde theater, who worked with Philip Glass, David Byrne and Lady Gaga in his six decades of career. He was 83.
The director “Einstein on the Beach” died on Thursday in his house in Wassermühle, ny, after a “short but acute illness,” so his website.
“While he is faced with clear eyes and determination of his diagnosis, he still felt forced to continue working and created until the end,” the explanation said. “His works for the stage, on paper, sculptures and video portraits as well as the Watermill Center will last as Robert Wilson's artistic heritage.”
Wilson was born on October 4, 1941 in Waco, Texas, in a conservative family of Southern Baptist. As a child, he fought with a language disability and learning disabilities, but was supported by his ballet teacher Byrd Hoffman.
“She heard me stuttering and she said to me:” You should take more time to speak. You should speak slowly, “he said observer 2015. “She said a word for over a long period of time. She said home and tried it. I had overcome stuttering within six weeks.”
In 1968 Wilson opened an experimental theater workshop that was named after his mentor: the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds. In 1969 he created the Byrd Hoffman Water Mill Foundation, under which he founded the Watermill Center in 1992.
Wilson moved to Brooklyn in early 20, ny, where he studied interior design and architecture at the Pratt Institute. He later joined the Memorial Hospital Goldwater Ministry of Recreation, where he danced to Catatonic Polio patients with iron lungs.
“Since the patients were largely paralyzed, the work he did with them was more mental than physically”, ” wrote His former colleague Robyn Brentano in frieze. “With his unconventional openness and tenderness, he distinguished the hidden characteristics of people.”
Wilson began to teach movement courses in Summit, New Jersey, while he wrote his early pieces. One day in 1968 he experienced a white policeman who was just meeting a pigeon, silent black young Raymond Andrews as he walked along the street. Wilson came to Andrew's defense, appeared in his name in court and finally adopted him. Together, Andrews and Wilson created “Deafman Blend”, a seven -hour “Silent Opera” that was premiered in 1970 in Iowa City, Iowa.
“The world of a deaf child opened us like a wordless mouth. For more than four hours we inhabit this universe, where, in the absence of words, 60 people had no words except moving,” wrote French surrealist Louis Aragon After the Paris premiere of 1971. “I have never seen anything better since I was born. Never, never a game near this one because it is awake and the life of the closed eyes, the confusion between everyday life and life every night, reality mixes with dream, everything that is inexplicable in the life of pigeon.”
Read more: Philip Glass and 'Einstein on the beach': How an opera has changed everything
In 1973 Glass took part in a performance by Wilson's “The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin”, which ran 12 hours from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.
“We worked over time – four hours – and how we would share it,” said Glass The guardian 2012. “I discovered that Bob thinks with a pencil and paper; everything appeared as a drawings. I composed music with it and then began to stage Bob.”
Times Classical Music critic Mark Swed called “Einstein” “simply the most important opera of the last half century”, although “nothing about what the composer Philip Glass and director Robert Wilson put on stage.” In fact, “Einstein” has become a cult classic, although there is no Einstein, no beach and no story.
Wilson and Glass have come together again to “The Civil Wars: to be measured best if it is no longer”, which also contained music by Talking Heads Frontmann Byrne for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. The project, which was supposed to last 12 hours, was ultimately never completed due to financing problems. In 1995 Wilson shared his concerns regarding art financing in the USA with the Times.
“The government should take lead”, Wilson Times employees told Jan Breslauer. “By giving the private sector to the private sector in a capitalist society, we will measure the value of art by selling the products. We must have a cultural policy [instead]. There must be a balance between the government and the private sector.
Read more: Review: Robert Wilson finds the poetry in “Lecture about nothing”
“One of the few things that will stay that time is what artists are doing,” says Wilson. “You are the diary and the diary of our time.”
In addition to his stage work, Wilson created drawings, sculptures, furniture and installations from 1975, which he showed in the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York. In 2004 Wilson produced a number of video portraits with Brad Pitt, Winona Ryder, Renée Fleming and Alan Cumming. In 2013 he would return to the medium with Lady Gaga as his topic.
His work on the installation “Memory/Loss” brought him a golden lion for sculptures in the Venice Biennale in 1993.
One of Wilson's last projects was an installation that Salone del Mobile commissioned in Michelangelos Rondanini Pietà in Milan's Castello Sforzesco in April. The project examined the pain of the Virgin Mary after the death of Christ with a combination of music, light and sculpture.
“I create my own vision of the artist's unfinished masterpiece, which has been torn between a feeling of awe -like awe and in -depth admiration,” he said wallpaper.
Wilson is survived by Andrews; His sister Suzanne; and his niece Lori Lambert.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.