The National Theater and Concert Hall are kicking off the celebration for their 20th anniversary in an unusual way — a lecture. Call it a "soft opening" — like the ones hotels and department stores have before their auspiciously chosen dates of their "real" openings.
But there is nothing soft about Sunday's speaker, the celebrated American avant-garde stage director and playwright Robert Wilson, who will use images from his prolific career to explain his creative process. His talk is not just for theater lovers or professionals. The 65-year old Wilson's interests go far beyond theater. He is the epitome of a modern renaissance man — a choreographer, sculptor, painter and furniture designer as well.
Not exactly what one might have expected from a man who started studying business administration at the University of Texas before switching to the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn to get a bachelor's degree in architecture.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF NTCH
The Texas-born Wilson has been shaking up the theater world since 1969, one year after he founded an experimental performance company, the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, in New York. The company's production of The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud that year served notice that a major talent had arrived.
Wilson gained world renown for his work with composer Philip Glass on the modern opera Einstein on the Beach, which had many of the hallmarks of Wilson's style: slow movements, austere staging and a collaboration with a famous musician.
He is also famous for disregarding time constraints.
The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin lasted 12 hours, while KA MOUNTain and GUARDenia Terrace lasted for seven days.
I asked Craig Quintero, an assistant professor at the Shih-Chien University's Institute of Fashion & Communication Design and founder of Riverbed Theater, what set Wilson apart from his contemporaries.
"Wilson's early performances were so startling and refreshing because most experimental theater practitioners at the time were staging minimalist productions or anti-theatrical productions that challenged the conventions of traditional theater," Quintero said in an e-mail. "America's most renowned companies ... were producing works that focused on the pure physicality of the actor and broke down the invisible wall separating the audience from the performers. Amidst these rough, anti-theatrical works, Wilson's elaborate sets, sculptural movements, and intricate lighting rejoiced in the magical possibilities of the basic elements of theater: light, sound, space, movement, and time."
"His theater of image performances combined the structural sensibilities of an architect with the artistic eye of a painter, who instead of using oil and canvas used performers and lights," he said.
Quintero noted that Wilson has become the yardstick against which all others are measured.
"After seeing Wilson's performance of Deafman Glance [a silent opera], Surrealism's founder Andre Breton praised the production in a letter that was published in a French newspaper: "Bob Wilson is not a surrealist. He is what we, from whom Surrealism was born, dreamed would come after us and go beyond us," Quintero said.
"For an emerging artist like Wilson, Breton's review was akin to receiving a letter of recommendation from God. Ever since that time, Wilson's work has became a measuring stick for theater practitioners around the world, and the term "Wilson-esque" has become an important term in the theatrical lexicon, used to describe a production's intricate lighting, glacial pacing, sculptural set, or surrealist imagery. Even productions that do not consciously reference Wilson's work are interpreted and discussed in relationship to his performance style," he said.
Quintero said that both as a student and a professional he was inspired by Wilson's work. In 2004, Riverbed stage his play The Life and Times of Robert Wilson, at the National Experimental Theater.
"In the show, we used Wilson's aesthetics to explore the mythology of Wilson. He was both the form and substance of our own creative journey," Quintero said.
Wilson's lecture will be hosted (and translated) by another celebrated theater director, Performance Workshop founder Stan Lai. The three-hour lecture will include time for a question-and-answer session.
The management of the National Theater and Concert Hall are justly excited about having Robert Wilson, if only for an afternoon. But they have put together a wonderful year of performances that starts in March after the theaters reopen from their extended Lunar New Year/annual maintenance break.
The line-up ranges from Tadashi Suzuki with Dionysus in March and Wilson's collaborator Philip Glass with the Philip Glass Ensemble Retrospective in April to the Deutsch Oper am Rhein's Der Rosenkavalier with the National Symphony Orchestra in June.
Famed German choreographer Pina Bausch's company will appear September and Cloud Gate Dance Theater is scheduled for November. The anniversary year will be brought to a close by the Performance Workshop's production of Lai's new play Like Shadows in December.
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