Robert Wilson, Director of Experimental Theatre, Has Died Aged 83

Robert Wilson, a masterful director of experimental theatre and opera, has died aged 83. He was perhaps best known for his celebrated collaboration with Philip Glass, Einstein on the Beach (1976), considered one of the most radical operas of the past 75 years.

Born in Waco, Texas, in 1941, Wilson studied business administration at the University of Texas before moving to New York in 1963, where he first encountered the work of Merce Cunningham and George Balanchine – two pillars of modern dance in the United States.

After studying art at the Pratt Institute, Wilson joined the Recreation Department of Goldwater Memorial Hospital, where he worked with terminally ill and abandoned patients on new forms of dance. Writing for frieze, his colleague from the hospital – and later a member of his theatre group – Robyn Brentano remembered Wilson choreographing patients in an iron lung by placing light sticks in their mouths. ‘Because the patients were largely paralyzed, the work he was doing with them was more mental than physical. With his unconventional frankness and tenderness, he drew out people’s hidden qualities.’

In the mid-1960s, Wilson founded the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, a collective of dancers, artists, poets and musicians who would go on to mount some of the most challenging theatre of the 1970s and ’80s. They first received major acclaim – largely in Europe – with Deafman Glance (1970), an entirely silent opera featuring Wilson’s partner, Andy DeGroat; Ana Mendieta; Sheryl Sutton and Paul Thek. Reviewing the show in Paris, Louis Aragon believed the production amounted to a revival of Surrealism.

For the next five years, the Byrds would mount increasingly long, complex works, including KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE: a story about a family and some people changing (1972) – a 24-hour gesamkunstwerk mounted in Shiraz, Iran; The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin (1973); and A Letter for Queen Victoria (1974), before the group was disbanded.

In 1976, Wilson and Philip Glass premiered Einstein on the Beach in Avignon, France, the first in Glass’s ‘Portrait Trilogy’, though the opera – with a libretto by artist and poet Christopher Knowles – would not be widely seen until it was revived at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1984, with new choreography by Lucinda Childs. As the New York Times wrote of a 2012 performance, Einstein was ‘seen as a combative declaration from the booming downtown scene directed against the established uptown culture, especially the complex, intellectual styles of contemporary music sanctioned within academia.’ By the 2010s, those ‘bad times’ were ‘long gone’, and Einstein cemented as a masterpiece of 20th century music and theatre.

Subsequent decades saw Wilson mount numerous exhibitions around the world, many of them in collaboration with composers and writers. In 1990, The Black Writer – written with William S. Burroughs and Tom Waits – premiered at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg. Jon Fosse’s Edda – an interpretation of Norse mythology – appeared in 2017. And in 2019, Wilson premiered Mary Said What She Said, a monologue by Darryl Pinckney, starring Isabelle Huppert. Throughout these years, he also restaged well-known plays and operas, including works by Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht, Goethe, Arnold Schoenberg and Gertrude Stein.

In addition to his practice as a director, Wilson was a celebrated visual artist, especially for his innovative environments and furniture design. In the 1990s, Wilson staged art exhibitions of his drawings, sculpture and videos, often drawing heavily on his skills in lighting and architecture. They demonstrated his growing eclecticism, from experimental filmmaker to celebrity portraitist. In 1995, he created an immersive installation in the Clink, near London Bridge, for Artangel. Drawings from Einstein appeared at the Morgan Library in 2012; portraits of Lady Gaga appeared at the Louvre the following year. His furniture designs were shown throughout his lifetime, most recently at MDFG in 2022.

In 1992, Wilson founded the Watermill Center – ‘an interdisciplinary laboratory for the arts and humanities’ – on Long Island. It has since become a destination for contemporary performers, and its studio and workshops programme helped support several generations of young artists.

‘To me, my work has never been work,’ he told the New York Times in 2024, when he was included, at 82, as one of the ‘unstoppable’ artists of the moment. ‘It is a way of living, like breathing or walking. No one can teach you to walk, really. You learn by falling down and getting up.’

^{Main image: Robert Wilson, The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud, 1969, performance view. Courtesy: Robert Wilson Archives at the Byrd Hoffman Water Mill Foundation; photograph: Martin Bough}