Renowned Performance Artist Robert Wilson On Stage At University of Hartford
Robert Wilson needs more time.
The eminent theater artist, known for his languorous, meditative, shape-shifting productions is in a meeting Monday afternoon and asks me to call again in 15 minutes.
Robert Wilson is giving a three-hour lecture/performance Thursday, March 10, at the University of Hartford’s Lincoln Theater.
It’s not the first time I’ve waited, with anticipatory pleasure, for an audience with the wondrous, time-warping Wilson. As a college student in the mid-1980s, I saw him perform at an AIDS benefit in Cambridge, Mass. Wilson’s entrance took 25 minutes, as he walked with ultra-slow, angular physical grace toward the center of the stage. Once there, he quietly recited leisurely excerpts from the text he and David Byrne had prepared for their multi-media collaboration “The Knee Plays.”
I’d already had my mind blown by Wilson’s magnum opus, “the CIVIL warS” at the American Repertory Theatre. “the CIVIL warS” was a 12-hour theater piece created for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, though it ended up not being produced there at all, and has still never been staged in its entirety in one place. It consisted of grand visual vignettes that shifted with glacial pace while forcing a prolonged confrontation with challenging moments from American history.
The A.R.T. presented several other Wilson productions during the late 1980s and early 1990s, including “The Knee Plays” and a peaceful rethinking of Euripides’ death-strewn “Alcestis.” That turned out to be Wilson’s
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