The aesthetics of polyphonous gesture
Master of inertia and formal abstraction : Robert Wilson as director in the opera.
Richard Wagner's conception of the integrated work of art begins with a criticism of the imbalanced distribution of power within the opera of his time: the dominance of the singer over the composer, of the aria over the orchestra, of the music over drama, and of melodramatic declamation over more meaningful acting. The orchestra merely accompanies the singer's aria, the music overshadows the dramatic component of the piece, and the acting of the singers serves only to emphasize their arias. It is through a rigorous formal analysis of the opera and a reevaluation of its different components that Wagner hopes to achieve the integrated and unified work that has come to be known as the Gesamtkunstwerk.
The novelty of his concept does not lie not in the idea that all the arts should come together to form a combined work of art -which was, after all, the founding idea of the opera since Monteverdi- but that they should be synthesized in a particular way, mindful of their respective roles and relations, as well as their limitations. Wagner's critique emancipates those components of traditional opera that he finds to be in a falsely subservient position. More specifically, he aims to reform the acting that was previously too much at the service of the dominant aria. His preoccupation with acting is a constantly recurring topos in Oper und Drama. Acting in traditional opera seems to him too much like pantomime, for it does little more than replicate what is already present in the music or aria. The result of this gestural analysis is that the imitative relationship between aria, gesture and orchestra must be abolished and that each component must be assigned a new, proper place.
Within his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the actors will strive to express that which only they can express: gestures, according to Wagner, are the expression of that which cannot be expressed. Wagner reserves a domain for the actor's gesture such that it never repeats what another dimension of the opera -aria or libretto- already expresses. The orchestra no longer serves to accompany the arias but will help clarify the actor's gesture. The gesture becomes a broader concept that transcends the purely monological gesture of the individual to become a "polyphonous" gesture ("vielstimmige Gebärde"). The new opera is thus an integrated work of art in which the orchestra and actors abandon their traditional imitative dependence on the melodic aria in favor of a new form of gesticulation that unites orchestra and actors in a polyphony of gestures on stage and in the orchestra pit.
Wagner's formulation regarding a new aesthetics of the theatrical gesture will be picked up twenty years later by Adolphe Appia, whose Die Musik und die Inszenierung (1899) will lay the foundation of the non-literary theater on which Wieland Wagner will build his theatrical renewal and which will also lead to Robert Wilson's visual theater.
Symbols of modernity
Robert Wilson is an artist who uses all the elements of theater -light, sound, scenery, acting, choreography, text, costume- to flood our subconscious with imagination.
What is immediately striking is the relationship with the work of Wagner's grandson Wieland. His work too was dominated by a wild, instinctive, primitive sensuality. He systematically rejected the anecdotal and any realism was only present insofar as it had a symbolic function. And Wieland was also a virtuoso magician with light. Notwithstanding all the differences between the two, Robert Wilson recognizes the kinship with Wieland Wagner : "He gave the work space and freed it from 19th-century romanticism. And before anything else, he thought abstractly. To this day, it is difficult to convince singers that what they do is abstract. That is not part of their background. However, people today are able to appreciate a Rothko painting for its form or its colors without understanding what it means. (...) Charles Baudelaire wrote, after seeing Tannhäuser in Paris: ‘I found myself before something entirely new: I experienced a spectacle of light and space that I had never seen before.’ That was in 1861! And people still think that my empty spaces and my light are new or avant-garde..."
But unlike Wieland Wagner, who distanced himself from the Nazi reception of Wagner's work with his radically abstract style in post-war Bayreuth, Wilson's work is not opposed to one tradition or another: "I don't oppose, I do what seems right and natural to me. And my work, my way of thinking is basically very traditional if one considers the whole history of theater. Just think of theater in Japan, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Africa, among the Eskimos.... I could name most of the world. All make formal theater that is far from psychological and naturalistic tendencies. Our Western theater takes place in a small corner of the world. We are so blind, so disinformed as to what happens elsewhere! Some years ago in Bali I met a girl who knew 375 ways to move the eyes. If I were to require that of an opera singer...A lot of time passes before such things start functioning"
As he often puts it himself, he immerses himself in “autistic” theatre, theater that does not convey an explicit message or imposes one particular interpretation, but generates images that leave the spectator plenty of room to enter into a personal connection with it, to let his own images interfere with what is happening on stage. Robert Wilson's theater is an art space where neither naturalism nor psychologization has a place: "My work is formal theater. I'm not interested in naturalism. I hate naturalism. Naturalistic acting is lying. I prefer not to force an interpretation, but to let the audience enter the scene of their own free will, on their own. We are only there to make suggestions, not to insist."
Wilson's aversion to interpretation may at first glance seem like postmodern intellectual laziness, but for Robert Wilson it is a premise to work fidelity: "On the one hand one owes respect to the master but on the other hand one must guard against becoming his slave. When one surrenders too much to a cause then one becomes unbelievable. There are points where I agree with Wagner but also points where I contradict him. When I talk to theater people and demand that something must be abstract it usually leads to confusion. Abstract thinking is hardly entrenched in Western spoken theater and in musical theater. (...) I don't believe Mozart understood what he wrote. I don't believe that Shakespeare understood what he wrote. It's something that one can think about and reflect on but not completely understand. The works are larger than the man. It is not possible to fully comprehend King Lear. It is cosmic. I am the kind of artist who does not want to pretend to understand what he is doing because I think that is a lie. If I said that I understood a work, I would be limiting myself. I would overlook the many interpretative possibilities that are into each great work of art by choosing only one perspective when I claim to understand it."
In Wilson's theater, reflection or discussion clears the way for a very different kind of dialogue: that of experience. In its perfection, what Wilson shows demonstrates a quasi-dictatorial hand, reducing actors to puppets. On the other hand, he does not want to impose anything on the spectators. They are given the chance for an experience, but are free to refuse it.
As a basis, Wilson takes an architectural space design and fills it with abstract scenes focused entirely on the poetic. Each of his shows therefore bears the stamp of the highly refined aesthete. Always opting for an empty stage, he places man in a vast, almost cosmic context. He kidnaps the viewer into a dreamland of metamorphoses, ambiguities and associations, a fairy-tale world in which geometric relationships can playfully change and which often recalls that of Alice in Wonderland. In Wilson's theater, magical forces seem at work that make the figures, without visible motivation, move like puppets on invisible wires. Important is the backdrop: a horizon against which objects and actors stand out beautifully.
Robert Wilson's work can be explained from an aesthetic innovation, as a break with existing rules, norms and conventions. In part, however, it is also a form of compensation and sublimation of an earlier lack, a form of auto-therapy. For his earlier work, as far as the choice of actors was concerned, he often went looking outside the theater circuit: among people with completely different perceptions such as deaf-mutes, schizophrenics or the mentally handicapped. In this he was undoubtedly influenced by the fact that he himself stuttered so violently that until the age of seventeen he was forced to go through life virtually speechless.
The power of liquid light
The scenography of Madame Butterfly (Paris, 1993) typically demonstrates the elements of its highly efficient formal language: a floor with a few steps and slight differences in level, the horizontal line as a horizon, the backdrop as a stage-spanning sky and a few objects (a chair for resting, a sword, a headrest, a rock). Each object is anti-descriptive and destined for an abstract play in which the actors submit with mathematical precision to his iron alphabet of gestures. Only the child enjoys the freedom to move as it pleases. It is the only character who will touch the ground with its hands or look up to the sky. Opposites and contrasts are always an effective ingredient of Wilson's theater.
One of Wilson's first opera stagings was Richard Wagner's Parsifal. At first glance, it may seem remarkable that Wilson, who in principle keeps away from literary texts, ventured fairly quickly into one of the cultural monuments that carries with it a weighty history of re-interpretation: "I did Parsifal because I resent seeing a religious exercise on stage. For me, a high mass in the theater is an impiety and a sacrilege. And it is always utterly laughable when the holy grail is recited and glitter swirls down from the stage attic -that belongs in Las Vegas! Parsifal has a deeper meaning, and I believe Wagner's own performances have more to do with spirituality. Parsifal is certainly a work of general validity and not necessarily a Christian ritual."
Parsifal was designed by Wilson as a spatial experience of time. For the prelude, Wilson designed a light composition as a water-like substance, spread wide across the translucent backdrop, dissolving into a kind of liquid light via a slow and hallucinatory sunrise. Wilson's production was completely attuned to that transformable, liquid quality of light. Only the soloists appeared on stage. The chorus remained off-stage or in the orchestra pit. There was no forest, no castle, no magic garden, no grail castle. Nor was there a kiss. The literal aspects of the quasi-religious ritual were removed but Wilson retained the pathos of the myth. This was made all the more evident by the statuesque poses of the characters and the mysterious nature of the spectacle. Thus emerged a strong aesthetic ritualization of Wagner's emotionally charged music full of pain and yearning.
For Lohengrin (Zurich, New York), Wilson designed a transparent blue backdrop that he pierced with horizontal and vertical rays of pure white light that moved in phase with Wagner's music across the entire width of the stage.
At the intersection of time and space
Time plays a special role in Robert Wilson's theater performances. The audience becomes aware of time because some scenes are extremely slow. He himself does not consider his theater performances slow. On the contrary, in his opinion, he works in true time and there is too little time in conventional theater performances. They go too fast for him. There is not enough space for the actions. With Wilson, words and gestures have a certain importance and weight depending on the space around them. The more space, the bigger they become: " If I put a cup of coffee in a completely empty space, a tiny cup in a huge space, that cup will appear much bigger than in a space wich is filled with decor. The same goes for a movement in time. I remember when I started to go to the theater, I always felt too much was happening. I could not focus on everything at one time. I felt I was being bombarded with too many things.
When I created "The life and times of Sigmund Freud" in 1969, I was thinking of the stage as a battery of movements. There would be different energies on stage that would reflect the public. There would be things moving imperceptibly slowly or things moving rather quickly or a bit quicker or a bit slower. It was a construction of different kinds of movement. The movement in stillness and sitting, the awareness of movement in standing and walking across the stage. People said that it happened in slow motion, but I never thought about it that way. I think time has no concept, so to talk about my works as being slow narrows them. A gesture whether it is quicker or slower, is always full of time, so it is full of all kinds of energy."
When he was newly living in New York, he attended abstract dance performances and studied paintings, sculptures, drawings. Spoken theatre seemed to him like a bad lecture. Never did he feel comfortable. There was not enough virtual space on stage and not enough mental space in the staging. That changed when he was introduced to Oriental theater and saw Suzushi Hanayagi, the Kabuki actress. He immediately had a great affinity with her theater proposals because there was so much freedom. But initially he liked the work of George Balanchine and Merce Cunningham -it was abstract, classical, architectural. They constructed a space that made it impossible for him to look and listen at the same time, a mental space that provided opportunity for thought.
Thus every staging is a construction of space and time: "It is a framework that I put in place within which all kinds of contrasts are possible: slow, fast, inner, outer, long, short, hard, soft.... The quieter and slower moments are given a different weight by what happens around them. The more space something is given, the easier it is to see or hear it. My theater performances are not naturalistic, but my time is the so-called true time, the way you look at clouds drifting by, for example. Normally in theater we are forced to follow a story line, we have to understand what is happening on stage. Our minds have to stay alert to follow the actors' texts. In my performances, you can let yourself float with the words and images. You don't have to follow them attentively. You can freely associate, daydream. In the theater we often don't have time to think, because they work with accelerated time, with anecdotes, with plots necessary to get from one moment to the next, while our thoughts are not given any space. Theater is becoming more and more like television, even in Germany. If you go to a show on Broadway, you will notice that an audience reaction is programmed every thirty seconds. An incentive is given to provoke a response from the audience: laughter, amazement, understanding. The lyrics consist of one-liners, just like on television; small blocks, quick responses. We are so afraid to let ourselves go, to lose ourselves. But it is all right to get lost, to take time.
Time exists through space. It is the space around the time that is the construction. And the time around the space. Neither exists without the other. True, I usually make rather rigid frameworks, but during a performance you shouldn't really think about that. Time is not a fixed concept. My performances are saturated with time. If you start thinking about that, you miss the experience. The construction of time and space is not something mechanical or scientific, it is something you experience. By opening yourself up, both mentally and physically, enrichment can take place, meanings can reveal themselves. If you have to move slower than normal and start thinking about that, it becomes boring. All kinds of energies and speeds are contained in that slowness. And that comes from the experience of time. Experiencing is a non-intellectual way of thinking. You do it with your whole body. I always say that the mind is a muscle: in your elbow, in your toes, in your fingertips. And that feeling, that you can experience something with your whole body, makes my work saturated with time; it's not timeless, but saturated with time."
Robert Wilson sees time as part of a cross, a line from the center of the earth to the sky. Time is a vertical line, space a horizontal one. And this cross of space and time is the architecture of everything: "What interests me is the tension between those two lines: it is possible that time lines and space lines intersect, support each other, parallel even. I think about it more and more. When I have to give a lecture, when I have to play Hamlet, when I'm trying to make clear to an actor what he has to do. It's a way of constructing my physical presence. And there are two more lines-the natural and the supernatural. Naturalism in theater usually bores me: naturalistic spaces, naturalistic time units, naturalistic light. I find it interesting to have the natural and supernatural lines intersect."
Supernatural lines Robert Wilson finds in all art forms: "If you play Mozart on a piano and press a key, it connects to a string and the sound rises into space. When Cézanne made a gouache he put a horizontal brushstroke in one place and a vertical one in another. Building a building, you are placing a post and a lintel; in a chair or a table, you always have this cross. It can be anything - that's what artists do: they make decisions, constructions in space and time. Created things are constructed things"
Opera as cheeseburger
Robert Wilson has spent the past decade increasingly directing opera, an art form in which the concept of time is strongly determined by the musical score and severely limits the director's freedom at first glance. It hardly changed his concept of theatrical time: "Normally the action on stage is so busy and complicated that one is distracted from listening. Wagner's music is so full of emotion and passion that I believe it is best to perform it scenically very soberly. The counterpoint between the passionate acoustic components and the clear, visual line then gives the work a structure, an architecture. If the optical element only illustrates the music then what one sees is weak, purely decorative. In my opinion, it makes no sense to render something that is very passionate an sich just as passionately.
Wilson sees opera as a construction in which the music, text and movement all have their own layer. All those layers have their own rules and laws: "I don't believe that in an opera the text has to follow the music, even if that was the original intention. The music may have a different mental space than the text. And it's possible that the physical movements, the virtual space, the sets and the gestures all have their own rhythm and still form a whole, but in different mental spaces. It's just how you arrange those layers...(...) It's like a cheeseburger. You have bread, mayonnaise, onions, cheese and mustard, all together forming a sandwich. These are different structures, different layers, that belong together, that complement or sometimes oppose each other. It's the same with opera. For example, the music can be very fast while the singers move very slowly. That creates a certain tension. And if it's done well then it helps to hear the music better."
From the cheeseburger to the integrated artwork from Richard Wagner's Oper und Drama, it only seems a small step. Not coincidentally, Wagner's words in Parsifal "Ich schreite kaum, doch wähn ich mich schon weit, Du siehst, mein Sohn, zum Raum wird hier die Zeit" can be considered a pregnant and characteristic element of any staging by Robert Wilson.
Truly great essay! Compliments, and thanks.
Would love to have seen the production he came up with for Luigi Nono's "Undramatic Cantata" (critical jibe at the time) PROMETEO.