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Robert Wilson [1941-0] American

Rank: 102
Director, Theater Director

Robert Wilson is an American experimental theater stage director and playwright who has been described by the media as "[America]'s – or even the world's – foremost avant-garde 'theater artist'".

Architecture, Art, Christmas, Leadership, Society, Space

Quote	Tags	Rank
My work has always dealt with a kind of space that allows one to daydream.	Space	101
By giving the leadership to the private sector in a capitalistic society, we're going to measure the value of art by how many products we can sell.	Art, Leadership, Society	102
Light is architectural. It is sculptural.		103
If you slow things down, you notice things you hadn't seen before.		104
If you see the sunset, does it have to mean something? If you hear the birds singing does it have to have a message?		105
My theater is slow and calm, yet my life is fast and hectic, going in all directions.		106
There are schools teaching 'stage decoration' as a subject, and they actually call it that. I say: 'Burn those schools!'		107
What interested me was dance - the way that it was constructed with time-space constructions, and that it was abstract. I always thought: 'Why couldn't theater be that way? Or an opera?'		108
Usually in theater, the visual repeats the verbal. The visual dwindles into decoration. But I think with my eyes. For me, the visual is not an afterthought, not an illustration of the text. If it says the same thing as the words, why look? The visual must be so compelling that a deaf man would sit though the performance fascinated.		109
Chairs are like sculpture.		110
I do still collect chairs.		111
What was very interesting to me about Clementine Hunter's work is that she couldn't read or write, and she has recorded history of the plantation life and the southern part of the U.S. - the cotton harvests, pecan picking, washing clothes, funerals, marriages - in pictures.		112
The landscape of Texas is in all my work. It's that light; it's that sky.		113
To me, what is important in the theater is that we don't want to make a conclusion. We don't want to make a statement, don't want to say what something is. We want to ask, 'What is it?'		114
I'm supposed to be the guy who hates naturalism.		115
When we look back at the Mayans or ancient Egypt, we look at their art.		116
I never studied theatre; I learned it by doing it. If I had studied theatre, I would not be making the kind of theatre I am making.		117
Most artists don't understand what they do, and I don't think we have to. Other people do that better - they understand what I do better than I do!		118
My mother was a great typist. She said she loved to type because it gave her time to think. She was a secretary for an insurance company. She was a poor girl; she'd grown up in an orphanage, and she went to a business college - and then worked to put her brothers through school.		119
One of the few things that will remain of this time is what artists are doing. They are the journal and the diary of our time.		120
I'm an artist, not a philosopher.		121
All theater is dance.		122
I think that in my plays you can come in for 20 minutes and get something out of it. I'd like to do a play that would run for days. I don't think time is that important. Nature doesn't hurry the sky, the changing clouds and sunsets.		123
At the end of the 1960s, I was part of the downtown theatrical movement in New York that was making work in alleyways, garages, gyms, churches, non-traditional spaces. The idea was to get away from the illusion of the conventional theatre. But then I thought, what's wrong with illusion?		124
I grew up in a town where there were no galleries, no museums, no theaters - a very religious, ultraconservative community.		125
I think people are looking for an alternative to the fast pace of everyday life and entertainment.		126
Some years ago, I was invited to speak in Houston, Texas. They said I was a founder of 'postmodern theatre'. So I said to my office, 'This is ridiculous for me to go and speak about postmodern theatre when I don't know what it means, but... they're paying me a lot of money, so I'll go.'		201
I think that opera in Europe is 30 years ahead of America. There is a broader range of material presented to the public. They value contemporary opera.		202
Sometimes, when we're very, very still, we're more aware of movement than when we make a lot of movement outwardly.		203
My work is formal, not based on psychology.		204
The first thing you must know as an actor or director is the space you will inhabit. See the architecture; imagine where things can happen in space.	Architecture	205
If you take a Baroque commode and put a Baroque clock on top of it, maybe it is not so interesting as when you put a computer on top of it. Then you see both items in a new way.		206
I've always thought abstractly - through theme and variations rather than narrative.		207
Christopher Knowles, Buechner, Heiner Mueller, Burroughs, Chekhov, Shakespeare - it's all one body of work.		208
I start any work the same way. I start a rehearsal with silence.		209
The French, not the Americans, commissioned 'Einstein on the Beach.'		210
I've always been attracted to classic patterns in architecture, music and drama.	Architecture	211
When I was 12 years old, I went to Natchitoches, La.; it was summer vacation with my family. We visited a plantation, Melrose. And I met an Afro-American woman who was a painter. I already had some idea of what I wanted to do in life, and one of the things that interested me was painting.		212
The first year I was in New York, I met Martha Graham. She said, 'Well, Mr. Wilson, what do you want to do in life?' I was 21 years old, and I said, 'I have no idea.' And she said, 'If you work long enough and hard enough, you'll find something.'		213
I collect rocks from all over the world. I have a ring of stones that date to 3500 B.C. It's like a little Stonehenge.		214
I think by drawing, so I'll draw or diagram everything from a piece of furniture to a stage gesture. I understand things best when they're in graphics, not words.		215
I usually stay in on Sunday nights. I'm not much of a party person.		216
As a very young man growing up in Texas, usually I got a shotgun or cowboy boots for Christmas.	Christmas	217
I always thought of the English landscape as being English gardens.		218
I think that I've always been a kind of structured person.		219
When you're playing King Lear, you have to have a little humour, or you will have no tragedy when the king dies.		220
New York is very provincial. They're very cut-off; they don't have an awareness of so much that is going on in the world.		221
My tax dollar, which goes to New York State Council on the Arts, is by and large only spent to fund people from the state of New York! And you want to be the cultural capital of the world?		222
The reason you work as an artist is to stay open and ask questions.		223
I had no idea I was going to have a career in the theater. I did not plan it.		224
In Europe, unlike the States, they have a cultural policy.		225
My method is much like choreography. I don't sit at a table. I work in a room with people.		226
Actors always start with the voice and language. That's wrong. They should start with the body. The body is an actor's most important resource.		301
Increasingly, I find myself drawn to classic forms - to Euripides, Shakespeare and grand opera.		302
Everything in Wagner's work - the music, the acting, the staging - stemmed from the text. Everything served to interpret the text.		303
Counterpoint is difficult. I have been doing it since the beginning of my career. But it is not just taking any opposite. It is finding the right opposite.		304
I did a masterclass at the Juilliard and asked the students, 'Can you stand?' 'Sure.' 'Can you walk?' 'Sure.' They couldn't. They had never really thought about it.		305
I don't see much difference between living and working. I think living is a part of my work. People often say, 'How can you work so much?' I don't think about it as work. I think of it as a way to live.		306
If we lose our culture, we lose our memory.		307
We're so afraid to lose the audience. Let the audience go.		308
I want to work with Jay-Z.		309
I think mystery... allows us time to dream.		310
There hasn't been a great romance in my life.		311
Yes, I've been in love, but I guess I'm too involved with myself and my work. I think I'm in love with my work, and I'm in love with the people I work with.		312
I say I like to be alone, yet I am always surrounded by people.		313
I never thought about the relationship of my mother, my family, to the content of my work.		314
Most theater tells you what to think.		315
My work should be seen as poetry.		316
I try to present something that is full of time. Not timeless, but full of time. I never like a work where we try to update it, but it's still not interesting to see a work that is dated. If one is successful, then a work can be full of time. And time is very complex.		317
I had dinner with Marlene Dietrich in the early 1970s. I went to pick her up and she had someone with her, a dreadful man. He was writing a book about her, and he said to her, 'You're so cold when you perform,' and she said, 'You didn't listen to the voice.' She said the difficulty was to place the voice with the face.		318
I met a 13-year-old black child, Raymond, who had never been to school and had never learnt any words, yet it seemed to me that he was intelligent. It became apparent after a short period that Raymond thought in terms of visual signs and movements.		319
In my theater, I'm not trying to change the world.		320
When works get too intellectual, they lose their intensity.		321
The mind is a muscle.		322
I think it's just my nature. I can't work on one thing. I have to work on many things.		323
I learned loudness from working with Lou Reed.		324
It's important that we have the traditional operas and the repertory, but we should also have something new.		325
I don't see anyone for the first hour and a half that I'm awake. I don't like to talk, and I don't like to hear any sounds. People know not to bother me! I use that time to read, and make lists and notes of things I have to do later in the day.		326

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