Robert Wilson, the pioneering avant-garde playwright and theater director who collaborated with Philip Glass, Tom Waits, Lady Gaga, and more, has died. Chris Green, the executor of Wilson’s estate and the president of the Robert Wilson Arts Foundation confirmed the news to The New York Times, stating that the artist died Thursday (July 31) at his home in Water Mill, New York. Green relayed that Wilson died following a brief illness, but did not give an official cause of death. Wilson was 83.
Wilson was born in Waco, Texas in 1941. As a child he had difficulty speaking due to a stammer, so his parents sent him to a dancing instructor named Byrd Hoffman in an attempt to mend his confidence through movement. The decision was pivotal for Wilson; not only did Hoffman help him overcome his stutter, she also redefined his perception of dance and how a body can maneuver through space. Years later, Wilson permanently relocated to New York after studying architecture and interior design at Pratt Institute and returning to Texas. After settling in SoHo, he started his first New York theater ensemble, christening it the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds.
Much of Wilson’s work was characterized by unique lighting and stage design, and dealt with the expansion of time and delayed motion. KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE, a stage piece from 1972, took place over 10 days for a total runtime of 168 hours. Throughout, actors spent hours doing simple tasks like walking across the stage. “I was interested in observing life as it is and how that was special,” Wilson wrote of the performance in 2013. “Someone baking bread or making a salad or simply sipping tea is what I found interesting.”
Though he wrote and directed plays throughout the late 1960s and early ’70s, Wilson’s best-known early work is Einstein on the Beach, a four-act opera he created with composer Philip Glass. The five-hour piece premiered at the Festival d’Avignon in France in July 1976, and then staged at New York’s famed Metropolitan Opera House—but not at the request of the Met. After the piece was rejected by the institution, Wilson rented the venue for $90,000. A second performance was booked after the first show sold out. “It was a crazy mixture of people who turned up, traditional opera-goers and people who had never been before,” Wilson told The Guardian in 2012. “Even so, we ended up in debt, but those performances really established us both.”
Einstein on the Beach was not a narrative of Albert Einstein’s life, but it drew upon themes connected to the renowned theoretical physicist. “Practically every image comes from Einstein’s life or ideas: trains, spaceships, clocks,” Philip Glass said in the same 2012 interview with The Guardian. “I suggested we have a musician taking his part, because Einstein played the violin—although he was such an amateur musician he couldn’t possibly have played the music I composed for him.” Wilson and Glass collaborated again in 1984 for one act of The Civil Wars: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down, which contained additional sections composed by David Byrne, Jo Kondo, and others. Glass and Wilson also worked together on a pair of 1998 operas titled White Raven and Monsters of Grace.
In 1989, Wilson worked with Tom Waits and William S. Burroughs on a stage adaptation of The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets. The original text was an 1810 story by August Apel and Friedrich Laun that inspired Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Der Freischütz as well as Thomas De Quincey’s English version, The Fatal Marksman. Waits wrote music for the piece, which he would later record on his 1993 LP, The Black Rider.
Though Wilson worked with many underground luminaries and established performers—Laurie Anderson, Jim Jarmusch, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Martin McDonagh, Allen Ginsberg, and Tilda Swinton, to name just a few—he also ventured into the mainstream pop world. In 2013, Wilson designed the eye-catching set for Lady Gaga’s MTV Video Music Awards performance. Gaga and Wilson reunited three years later for an exhibition at the Louvre called “Video Portraits,” which starred Gaga in photo recreations of famous paintings. In a behind-the-scenes clip from the piece, Gaga looks up at Wilson in reverence and says, “I don’t even feel like I deserve to be here. I just want to earn it.”
