As the guest of honor at Paris’s Festival d’Automne, 72-year-old Robert Wilson is back on stage at the Théâtre de la Ville with his latest work, “The Old Woman.” Performances of the show will continue through November 23, but the American director is not stopping there. The Louvre is also giving him an exhibition and a series of events, which kicked off last week with Wilson’s theatrical adaptation of John Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing.”
The audience at the French premiere of “The Old Woman” on November 6 applauded with great enthusiasm when
Wilson was greeted with enthusiastic applause at the French premiere of “The Old Woman” on November 6. But this kind of attention is nothing new for the director, who received the same response a few days later following his performance of “Lecture on Nothing” in the Louvre’s auditorium. The spectators listened attentively as the pajama-wearing Wilson interpreted Cage’s original score in almost total silence — the text itself is constructed like a true musical score with its own rhythmic structure. “Doing nothing is a difficult exercise,” said Wilson of this work, which has touched him personally. The director met Cage shortly after arriving in Brooklyn in the 1960s and the two became fast friends. The relationship, Wilson told ARTINFO last month, influenced not only the director’s work but his entire way of thinking and living. His respect for and faithfulness to Cage’s work have informed his adaptation of “Lecture on Nothing,” which was originally commissioned by the Ruhr Triennial to commemorate the centennial of Cage’s birth. Following Cage’s advice that “if someone is tired, let him go to bed” to the letter, Wilson stretched out on stage during the performance, and the audience was floored.
“The Old Woman,” with Willem Dafoe and Mikhail Baryshnikov, is based on a text by absurdist poet Daniil Kharms. Kharms was first accused of anti-Sovietism in 1931, for which he was arrested several times and finally sent to a psychiatric ward at Leningrad Prison No. 1, where he died at age 36 in 1942. The play retains only a few fragments from the original story, which was written in 1939 in Saint Petersburg. Dressed in black suits with bow ties and white make-up on their faces, two mischievous clowns or diabolical mimes play all the characters. The result is an explosion of the narrative structure — one of the characteristics of Wilson’s theater — and the presence of death haunting the stage while lighting casts eccentric pieces of furniture in an anthropomorphic light. Dafoe and Baryshnikov borrow the gestures of burlesque, vaudeville, Noh theater, and silent movies, maintaining these registers perfectly without one ever dominating the other. The strength of the play lies in the actors’ vague movements, their way of turning in circles and going backwards, and of never finishing anything — either in their gestures or in the story (which is aimless, with no beginning or end). This doesn’t prevent “The Old Woman” from suffering from excessive formalism — a virtuoso orchestration distances us from its content, which are both impenetrable and existential. What could have been a splendid danse macabre— in tragicomic tradition of the genre — or a political phantasmagoria on the dangers of socialism, ultimately leaves us with only the style of the spectacular.
Wilson’s unusual project “Living Rooms,” which opened November 14 in the Louvre’s chapel room, brings the artist’s creative universe into the museum. Objects from his personal collection, including statuettes, masks, and drawings, are on view, and all are said to be sources of inspiration for his work. As the title suggests, we’re in Wilson’s home, reconstructed for the occasion. As often happens in his plays, objects levitate above the floor, hanging from up high. It’s a small personal museum and it recalls the studio of André Breton through its eclecticism and wild mixing of genres and periods. Pumps that belonged to Marlene Dietrich appear alongside chairs, which Wilson collects. An exclusive video series, “Gaga Portraits,” which was just produced, stages scenes with the pop singer. She plays the subjects of famous paintings, Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière by Ingres, Marat by David, and John the Baptist by Solario. “Lady Gaga is a very visual person… she is able to change her nature with disturbing speed,” Wilson told Le Figaro.
Wilson returns to Théâtre de la Ville to direct “Peter Pan,” running December 12 through 20.
