Design of
Dreams:
robert wilson

Virginia Woolf’s groundbreaking novel Orlando is like a reflection of Robert Wilson’s practice: shifting, multifaceted and poetic. In this adventure novel, the reader follows the destiny of the title character who, over the course of four centuries, traverses eras, places and even genders. Robert Wilson conjured this journey in five acts: an iceberg, a prehistoric bird, a swing, and a prodigious play of shadow and light punctuated the show, transforming it into a dreamlike theatre of overlapping temporalities.

The clothes emerged from a world of ice, then fire, rocks and smoke. Femininity was magnified in all its complexity, both in creations by Maria Grazia Chiuri and in the movements and sets imagined by Robert Wilson. For those just discovering this other world, he left plenty of room for interpretation. Of his choices, Robert Wilson explained, “I worked with sound, I worked with light. Light is what creates space. Light is what helps us hear and see. My aim is not to tell a story. What I’m offering is an experience, with the freedom to think and dream.”

Born in Waco, Texas, in 1941, Robert Wilson has established himself as one of the most singular creators of the past half-century. A director, visual artist, light sculptor and choreographer of silence, he has revolutionized experimental theatre with a radical aesthetic in which every gesture, every sound and every lighting technique become a source of sensation.

Trained in architecture and visual arts, notably at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, Robert Wilson founded the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds collective in 1968. It was in the melting pot of New York City that he conceived his first major works, including Deafman Glance (1970), a seminal piece that shook up traditional narrative codes.

In 1976, he co-wrote with Philip Glass the opera Einstein on the Beach, a hypnotic masterpiece that marked a decisive turning point. Collaborations with eclectic talents – among them Heiner Müller, Tom Waits, Laurie Anderson, Jessye Norman and Marina Abramović – attest to his taste for experimentation and dialogue between art forms. A tireless explorer of forms and meanings, Robert Wilson remains an architect of dreams who, through the power of his images and stagings, invites us to rethink our relationship with time, space, gender and beauty.