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Robert Wilson Turns to Choreography
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14181 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1988 |
2,054 Words |
| Author
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David Stevens
David Stevens is music critic for the International Herald
Tribune. |
In a little less than two decades, Robert Wilson has become an established phenomenon on the European theatrical scene, mainly with his large-scale, slow-moving, meticulously organized total spectacles, in which he has been responsible for virtually all the creative aspects--script, staging, designs, lighting. The production of his Deafman Glance in 1971 at the theater festival in Nancy opened the door at a time when French cultural authorities were beginning to be hospitable to the New York avant-grade in all the arts. Einstein on the Beach, his celebrated "operatic" collaboration with the composer Philip Glass, was financed largely by a commission from the French Cultural Ministry; it was first performed in 1976 at the Avignon Festival, and then at the Autumn Festival in Paris.
Mainstream Work
In recent seasons, however, Wilson has moved more into the theatrical and operatic mainstream by staging established works for established theaters--a double bill of Medeas, one by the French Baroque composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier, the other by the contemporary composer Gavin Bryars, at the Opera de Lyon; Euripides' Alcestis for the American Repertory Theater, a production also imported by the Paris Autumn Festival two years ago; Hamlet Machine and other pieces by the East German playwright Heiner Mueller, and Richard Strauss' opera Salome at La Scala in Milan. Now, thanks to an offer from Rudolph Nureyev, the Paris Opera's ballet director, Wilson has made his debut as a choreographer with a new production of Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien, a strange and unclassifiable collaboration by Gabriele D'Annunzio and Claude Debussy that manages to keep a tenuous and infrequent place in the repertory mainly because of its music. Wilson's
... (1994 of 12475 Characters)
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