Robert Wilson, born October 4, 1941, in Waco, Texas, U.S.A., is the playwright, director, and producer, known for his avant-garde theatre works.
Wilson studied business administration at the University of Texas at Austin, but he dropped out in 1962 and moved to New York City to pursue his interest in the arts. After earning a degree in interior design from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1966, he started his own experimental theatre group, the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, which operated out of his loft in the Soho neighbourhood of Manhattan. Wilson quickly gained recognition among New York’s art elites. His productions were praised for their innovative use of lighting, space, and sound and for their provocative contradictions of time and place. By the early 1970s he was staging works throughout Europe.
Wilson’s range was vast; he produced Japanese Noh plays, standard operas such as The Magic Flute and Salome, and 12-hour-long theatre pieces. Among his best-known works were The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin (1974); Einstein on the Beach (1976), on which he collaborated with composer Philip Glass; Death, Destruction, and Detroit (1979); and The Civil Wars (1983).
The 1995 premiere of his Hamlet: A Monologue at the Alley Theatre in Houston, Texas, was a major homecoming event for Wilson. Working as writer, director, designer, and solo performer, he presented Hamlet at the moment of his death, flashing backward through 15 of the original’s scenes. He danced awkwardly, threw childish tantrums, growled, and was haunted by props that eerily evoked absent characters. Wilson followed that success with a production of Snow on the Mesa, a dance work that paid tribute to Martha Graham, at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and a staging of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson’s 1934 opera Four Saints in Three Acts for the Houston Grand Opera.
In the 1990s Wilson also earned acclaim for his trilogy performed by the Thalia Theater company of Hamburg, Ger. The series began with The Black Rider (1990) and continued with Alice (1992), a retelling of the Lewis Carroll books, both with music by Tom Waits. The final installment, Time Rocker (1996), had more to do with Wilson’s minimalist decor and lighting and less with music (by Lou Reed) and dialogue (by Darryl Pinckney). Dubbed “art musicals,” the works offered an alternative experience to the typical Broadway production—which Wilson believed was becoming more and more like television, with a programmed audience reaction every few seconds.
Wilson continued to stage productions into the early 21st century. In addition to directing revivals of his works, in 2004 he premiered I La Galigo, which was based on an Indonesian poem that recounts the creation of humankind. Wilson also received critical attention as an installation artist and as a furniture designer.
Source: Britannica
Einstein on the Beach
An opera in four acts for ensemble, chorus and soloists
– 1976
– 270′
Music by Philip Glass
Created with Robert Wilson
CAST:
2 female and 1 male actors; 1 child (speaking roles): SATB chamber chorus (16) amp S; fl (pic, bcl), fl (ssx), tsx (asx)/ 2syn
PREMIERE:
July 25, 1976 by the PGE at the Festival d’Avignon
NOTES:
First in a Glass Trilogy of operas about men who changed the world through the power of their ideas, “Einstein”‘s sub-text is science. The opera is non-narrative in form, and the producer has two options: to reproduce the original Robert Wilson production (which exists on videotape), or to create a new series of stage and dance pictures based on themes relating to the life of Albert Einstein.
One of the most iconic stage pieces of the 20th century, Einstein on the Beach would become Wilson’s most famous work. In Wilson’s first collaboration with composer Philip Glass, the two artists radically altered the way opera is made and received by upending conventions of score, plot and staging. While in much traditional opera these elements are constructed independently of one another, in Einstein the music, text and action were created together, in one seamless whole. Originally choreographed by Byrd Hoffman dancer Andy DeGroat, Lucinda Childs re-envisioned the movement in its 1984 revival. Childs’ choreography was used in the 1992 and 2012 revivals. Wilson scholar, Bonnie Marranca, has written that the accomplishment of Einstein is that it “provides us with extraordinary frameworks and systems with which we can rediscover basic realities.” (Text by Joseph Bradshaw)
Widely credited as one of the greatest artistic achievements of the 20th century, this rarely performed work launched its director Robert Wilson and composer Philip Glass to international success when it was first produced in Avignon, France in 1976 with subsequent performances in Europe and in New York at the Metropolitan Opera. It is still recognized as one of their greatest masterpieces. Nearly four decades after it was first performed and twenty years since its last production, Einstein on the Beach was reconstructed for a major international tour including the first performances in the United Kingdom and the first North American presentations ever held outside of New York City. The international tour of Einstein on the Beach began in Montpellier in the spring of 2012 and concluded in South Korea in the fall of 2015, bringing this ground-breaking work to new audiences and an entirely new generation.
Einstein on the Beach breaks all of the rules of conventional opera. Instead of a traditional orchestral arrangement, Glass chose to compose the work for the synthesizers, woodwinds and voices of the Philip Glass Ensemble. Non-narrative in form, the work uses a series of powerful recurrent images as its main storytelling device shown in juxtaposition with abstract dance sequences originally by Andrew de Groat, and for the 2012 version by American choreographer Lucinda Childs. It is structured in four interconnected acts and divided by a series of short scenes, or “knee plays”. Taking place over almost five hours, there are no traditional intermissions. Instead, the audience is invited to wander in and out at liberty during the performance. Einstein on the Beach was revolutionary when first performed and is now considered one of the most remarkable performance works of our time.
Source: Robert Wilson
Sila Blume 
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