Minor Project: Robert WIlson- Introduction

Robert Wilsons theories surrounding the theatre of dreams and visions came out of New York loft culture of the 1960s, this is an experimental phase of New York particularly that entered mainly around Jazz music but did extend further to other art forms. While Wilson was experimental in his work, he did however reject the movement of his time which centred around 'live art', this is essentially a half way house between dance and acting, sort of like interpretive dance. Wilson's work took a notable when he made King of Spain. This was a very strange piece that featured very impressive art flats to build the set. However, the illusion that they created was then taken from by a large hole in the back of the room set (a victorian drawing room) that revealed a second set of the countryside. Actors were completely unfazed by this anomaly, behaving in a typical high class, genteel manner which you would expect of their characters. However, they did perform some very uncharacteristic action, things like piling heaps of hay on stage, lighting shelves of candles and playing indecipherable, odd board games. An athlete in shorts and a singlet would periodically run across the countryside back drop. All of this madness then reached a climax in the finale when a giant set of cats legs walks across the stage.

The piece contained no dialogue, no plot and left audiences completely in the dark about its meaning, leaving them to discern that for themselves. The complete lack of sense and social order was a staple in Wilson's work as he believed that human beings register the world in two ways, on two separate screens, the internal and the external. The external screen is where our conscious lives and how we ascribe meaning and feelings that are the same as other people. In other words this is how we relate to the world based on the culture which we inhabit. The interior screen is where we form and apply personal meanings, both screens are constantly at work as everything we perceive is unpacked in a personal and cultural manner. Wilson Argues however that people are turning more inwards. He says that this is a direct result of the constant barrage of media we are subjected to and the fact that we spend so much time around other people often with them in our personal space (i.e. on subways etc) that we retract into our seemingly safe internal screen. Wilson describes this as a necessity and would say that we must be able to do this in order to survive. This is why his works are so objectively strange, because he aims to engage his audience with their internal screens, this is because our culture doesn't really have an obvious stand point on artworks this outrageous (and certainly less so at that time) so people have to resort to their own raw feelings on the subjects.