The known trend that America is seeking "inclusion" in the
field of modernity, especially in Europe, and particularly in the
fields of art, is definitely confirmed in the bright biography of
Robert Wilson. He is an avant-garde visual artist, opera and
theater director and scenographer who presents in a postmodern way
the forms, quests and style of European modernism in the 20th
century, transforming them into a language of communication of
today's culture, the culture of the 21st century. The focusing of
an avant-garde artist like Wilson on the European dimensions of art
has been materialized in the rich European career of an American
who was born in Texas and who is currently the artistic director of
an Arts Center in New York.
Robert Wilson's biography highlights how he has developed as
an avant-garde artist specifically in Europe amongst its modern
quests, in its most significant cultural centers, galleries,
museums, opera houses and theaters, and festivals - Paris Autumn
Forum, Chekhov International Theatre Festival in Moscow and BITEF
in Belgrade. Wilson has worked with major European names such as
playwright Heiner Müller -"Quartet" 1987, "Hamlet Machine" 1986 and
"Hamlet - Monologue" where he performed as an actor, 1995, Samuel
Beckett's - "Oh, happy days!", 2008, Luxemburg, "The Ultimate Band
of Crap", 2009, Spoleto. He has also worked on classical texts as
"Odyssey", Athens, 2012, Ibsen's "Lady from the Sea", 1998,
Ferrara, "Per Gynt", 2005, Oslo, Georg Büchner: "Woyzeck", 2000,
Copenhagen, "Leonce and Lena", 2003, Berlin.
In his visual projects and exhibitions Wilson has introduced
the theatricality, the dynamics of the theater; and in his
theatrical performances he has included mobile architecture, video,
aesthetics of modernism, and has cited cult visions of great
artists of European modernism as Magritte and others of his rang.
In his performances, along with his visual style, there is an
impressive musical score, and rhythm is the main instrument of his
extraordinary style. He has been concerned with silence and the
impact of body language, forms and light.
Robert Wilson won the theater award "Europe" for 1996 and is
presently one of the leading names of the avant-garde, and a
creator of the international theater language - visual, musical,
summarizing the discoveries of the modernity in the 20th
century.
Ionesco's "Rhinoceros", directed by Robert Wilson,
on the stage of the Romanian Theatre in Craiova -
2014
The performance of the theater in Craiova is a real
theatrical sensation, an event indicating that even a peripheral
stage could become a cultural capital when there is a vision for
what the modern theater is and who its leaders are. The Romanians
answer these questions by referring to their dramatist - the
absurdist Eugene Ionesco, directed by a world-famous name as Robert
Wilson, an American working actively on the European stages. This
choice has involved the entire theater troupe in Craiova in an
artistic challenge and we can say that what has been achieved is a
modern theatrical play at a level unseen. There is not a single
compromise or an element of stage performance, which is not in
synchrony with the high bar set by Wilson's decision. Several are
the particularly important impressions that have been shaped by
this performance. In the first place - the perfection which it
emits, its explicit visual decision, built with an impressive
knowledge of European modernism, and a remarkable aesthetic impact.
It is integral, multifunctional - video landscape, scenery,
actors-masks, music ... Wilson's theatre, where there is no
experiencing, no psychology, no emphasis on the direct contact
between the characters, and what we see is rather a technique and
play of shapes, grimacing and extreme metamorphoses, unfolds as a
modern opportunity to express the madness happening to man when
both nature and civilization are withering away...
The performance "Rhinoceros" explicitly defines the
absurdity in communication, speech, growing manipulation, as well
as the piles of paper covered with writing, documents and
newspapers, which modern societies produce. It shows all this
garbage which they produce despite all the forms of collective
existence overwhelming the opportunities for sincerity, contact,
love and individuality. Wilson's performance shows vividly that we
are moving as an avalanche toward the absence of normality,
overwhelmed by mass psychosis, and the domination of the crowd.
Especially strong is the impression of a repulsive world, of
destroyed connections between the characters, a world of shudder
and aggressiveness. Robert Wilson has reached a high note of
tragedy, with almost antique sounding of the message: We are all
rhinos! We even like our thick skins, our aggressive trample and
cries as rhinos. Words, newspapers, logic are so much deformed as a
means of manipulation that they are not even funny. The man must
become a rhino like all who are around him. And this news develops
into an observable diagnosis, which is in the core of "Rhinoceros."
Berenger, the famous hero of several Ionesco's plays, is left
alone, estranged and equally robbed as the mass of trampling
rhinos. All relevant states of the modern world have been
dramatically and vividly illustrated in Wilson's performance - from
absurdity and lack of communication to psychosis, manipulations and
at the end - to alienation and disintegration of humanity,
sincerity and love and disintegration of the individual himself,
crumpled under the pressure of the crowd.
Ionesco's text in the second part of the performance is read
by an actor who has the vision of the man with the bowler hat, a
prominent figure in the paintings of the modernist René Magritte.
This has dictated the director's decision that the characters in
the play should not communicate directly with each other and
created a repulsive picture of the human landscape - lacking
sincerity and emotion. There are only masks of the characters
through which they communicate like in a puppet theater. An
accentuation in the performance is an intermedia running in the
English language - a conversation between two women on the phone.
The downstage is strewn with human heads - this is how Wilson
creates the image of rhinoceros, which, according to Ionesco, rush
into the world of the characters. The director's intermedia between
two talking heads is filled with brutal hypocrisy, with patterns
and formal questions and answers, intrusive intonations typical for
aggressive communication, of which Wilson is apparently fed up as a
result of the deformed American way of life. The performance ends
with a children's song from the 60s, when Ionesco wrote his play,
slightly infantile and candied as a true Hollywood happy end of the
terrible absurdity: We are all rhinos! In the performance there is
some lightness and airiness, detachment and even elegance, a
graceful, ironic picture of modern metamorphoses of man and the
crushing crowd. Written more than 50 years ago, the play
"Rhinoceros" was perceived as an image of Nazism and later of
totalitarianism, of mass deformation of societies and suppression
of man's individuality. Today, Wilson opens the fan of distortions
that have lead to dehumanization of the modern world.
The performance in Craiova has attracted great interest. It
is a manifestation of the strategy to renovate and revitalize a
cultural space with innovative ideas, techniques and inspiring
culture. The theatre is no fun! says Ionesco. The theater is a
development strategy. And when the public deformations of
the modern world are shown with such an utmost accuracy,
clarity and aesthetic precision, the viewers can laugh, and also
situate themselves in the accumulated experience to dehumanize the
world and make it an animated series that has been multiplied
threateningly in the 21st century.
Having also seen some other performances of Robert Wilson
/"Hamlet Machine", Buchner's "Woyzeck", "Iron Horseman" in "Thalia
Theater" Hamburg/ I can sum it all up that the director possesses a
complex identity in the modern cultural landscape of the 21st
century. When 44 years ago Ionesco saw the author's performance of
Wilson in Paris, and wanted from Wilson to stage one of his plays,
there happened an event that later created the profile of the
director as a contemporary artist. In the 60s, when Rene Magritte
was still an icon of modernism, Ionesco, a representative of
absurdity or the so-called postmodernism, thought he could be best
realized via the instruments of the favorite style and visions of
the previous generation. Wilson, in that particular period - the
second half of the 20th century - was still looking for his
original style and therefore he refused to stage one of Ionesco's
plays. But in the late 20th century and nowadays, Wilson is the
figure that is realizing precisely this cultural task. The collage
style of his directing, which is based on his knowledge about
modernity in the first half of the 20th century, and his taste and
refinement in practice do not make him a rebel - postmodernist.
Rather, his profile is that of a cultural figure of the late 20th
century, as he managed to impose the modernist way of thinking and
the aesthetics of modernism of the time of its inception in Europe.
In this sense, Robert Wilson is an avant-garde artist who has
changed the cultural landscape using however the ideas and visions
of European modernists of the first half of the 20th century. This
is a significant contribution that only a few European artists have
perceived as a direction, a step leading to the 21st
century.
In the Balkans, where Wilson is less known, and mainly with
his participation in BITEF in Belgrade /Buchner's "Woyzeck", 2002/
and now with the performance in Craiova, he is really rearranging
serious layers - ignoring psychologism, the dominant system of
experiencing, staging of everyday life and setting the framework of
a modern form, unused by the theater in the Balkans, highlighting
and interpreting social conditions already known in Europe -
absurdity, dehumanization. In the post-totalitarian East European
countries it is still difficult to surmount the traumas of
communism and the Iron Curtain and finding new directions is in a
standstill. Renovation of this cultural environment is still caught
between ignoring the legacy of ideologization and making attempts,
in the individual countries, at searching for identity before
totalitarian times. Maybe this is why the avant-garde quests in the
Balkans are more concerned with folklore or traditional,
conservative forms of art in the countries of the
peninsula.
In this context, Wilson has brought cosmopolitanism,
well-established forms and principles that are important purely in
civilizational terms for a landscape such as the Balkans and
through which the European modernism and postmodernism of the 20th
century somehow have penetrated into that quite peculiar cultural
space attributing universality, already known in this region from
the TV videos, from animation films, which came into the region
mainly from America through the media. This important alloy of
universality, communicativeness of a new type which is
characteristic of the 21st century is bringing really ozonating air
into the cultural environment in the Balkans. In this sense,
Wilson's presence gives direction to the artists and also provides
the audience with an opportunity to acknowledge the theater as an
innovative part of modern culture of the 21st century.
June 2015
Craiova, Romania