Dead air of 13 seconds on stage feels like a very long time.  When Robert
Wilson froze in mid-sentence of his speech this evening, his outstretched
arm motionless in the air, I was certain that the strange, scary pause
must have lasted a couple of minutes.  It was amazing to time the tape
later: 13 seconds.

It never became clear if the pause was a demonstration of a point, the
effect of being overcome with the emotion of a 37-year-old memory, or
something else.  It was just one of many, many strange, puzzling aspects
of a rambling, nonlinear, but somehow "important" speech, in the sense
of the "Close Encounters" scene: "This means SOMETHING." And, yes, it
was eminently "theatrical," but not obviously so, the effort not showing.

The occasion was a preview event in San Francisco's Geary Theater,
before the performance of Wilson's "Black Rider." ACT artistic director
Carey Perloff asked him to talk about the genesis of the work, and then
she sat back to listen for a 40-minute monologue.  The speech came in
layers: an intriguing sentence here and there, but if you write it down,
suddenly it doesn't make sense...  except that it does...  sort of.  An
example: "The form is just the means to get you somewhere else." You can
parse that for a long time, but it doesn't lend itself to a simplified
restatement.

If you catch Wilson at one of his rare appearances, it becomes clear
why he doesn't give interviews or lectures.  The man doesn't like being
interpreted, and you can see why.  It's all more fun and "significant"
if you just let it be.

The man who, at 63, is one of the most recognized figures in theater
and opera, started his talk by saying - rather proudly - that he never
studied theater.  Coming from Waco, Texas (where "there was no theater
of any kind"), he was in his 20's when arriving in New York, where he
first sampled the performing arts.  "I went to see some Broadway plays,
but didn't like them.  Went to the opera, didn't like that much either.
Then I saw George Balanchine's works at the New York City Ballet, and I
responded to them, strongly.  Here was structure and space, letting the
audience come to it, instead of imposing something artificial.  In the
theater, it was always an illustration, a decoration on what I was
hearing."

He speaks of "abstraction...  space...  time," and suddenly, it's 1967
and Wilson is walking down the street in Summit, New Jersey.  Short
pause, then the voice changes, tinged with emotion: "I saw a policeman
about to hit a 13-year-old African-American boy over the head with a
club..." and here comes that long pause.  "I stopped the policeman."
Wilson resumes at last, "and I asked `why are you going to hit this
child"' and the policeman said, `It's none of your business,' and I said,
`But it is, I am a responsible citizen - why do you hit the child?' and
I eventually I left with the boy and the policeman, and we went to a
police station, and on the way, I heard sounds coming from the boy that
I recognized as the sounds as being those of a deaf person."

Wilson will speak later about the deaf's "hearing" with the body, and
the blind's "seeing" of images, relating the New Jersey episode somehow,
tenuously, to his philosophy of directing, but for now he takes a few
minutes to explain that eventually he adopted the boy, Raymond, "to save
him from being institutionalized." His winning argument before the
reluctant judge: "It would cost the state a hell of a lot of money to
lock him up.  And the judge says, `Mr.  Wilson, you have a very good
point.'"

A brief reference to bring the adoption and theater together: (Raymond)
thought in terms of pictures, while I was preoccupied with what I was
hearing..." but now Wilson starts talking about slowed-down film of
mothers speaking to babies, motions that may appear threatening, without
any basis for that in the speech, as "bodies move faster than we think
and speak." A quick aside to what could - perhaps should - be the point,
Wilson's seven-hour-long silent play becoming a hit in Europe, but he
is already into architecture ("what theater should be") and the
"horizontal-vertical tension in everything." He sketches out on paper
the opening scene of "Black Rider," speaks of a "visual map, the structure,
everything happening silently, no words, no music...  What I see doesn't
have to decorate what I hear."

Wilson speaks of his "Lohengrin" production, and his dismay with the
130-member chorus "walking to the beat of the music," a flash of anger
showing on his face, even long after what happened.  "They must walk
AGAINST the music..." and then he is off on having pictures in the mind
when listening to drama on radio, and the freedom to imagine speech when
watching silent movies, the point being...  WHAT?

He speaks of the "pretense, the artificiality of theater," the "fact"
that nothing is natural in plays, in operas, concluding - again, with
an element of perhaps deliberate indirection - that "a good actor is
one who stays open...  the artist must ask `what is it?'...  deal with
distance, space...  psychology often makes our work too complicated."
And then, back to Balanchine, and the choreographer's mastery of "time
and space."

And yet, even as with his "Black Rider," the gestalt of his presentation
not only exceeds the puzzling, "wrong" parts, but exists independently
of what is being said.  Said, seen, time, space, vertical, horizontal...
it really must mean SOMETHING.

Janos Gereben
www.sfcv.org
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