Robert Wilson

Adam’s Passion is the moving first collaboration between two “masters of slow motion who harmonize perfectly with each other” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung). In the spectacular setting of a former submarine factory, American director and universal artist Robert Wilson creates a poetic visual world in which the mystical musical language of the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt can cast its meditative spell. Three of Pärt’s major works – Adam’s Lament, Tabula rasa, and Miserere, as well as Sequentia, a new work composed especially for this production – are brought together here using light, space, and movement to create a tightly-woven Gesamtkunstwerk in which the artistic visions of these two great artists mirror each other.

Inspired by the German folktale, Wilhelm, a file clerk, falls in love with a huntsman's daughter. In order to marry, Wilhelm must prove his worth as a hunter and gain her father's approval. Naive and desperate, he makes a deal with a devil named Pegleg.

"This is a family tragedy, and in many ways, it is a very contemporary story." This is how Robert Wilson described Il trovatore, or Le Trouvère in its French version, commissioned from Verdi after the incredible success of the premiere of his Italian version in 1853. With a few changes and alterations to the original music, this version was first performed in 1857 at the Paris Opera. A light show unique to the stage director unfolds in the cold architecture, creating the perfect framing for Verdi’s music, dramatic and dark in this timeless opera.

A Winter Fable is a story told by the triptych of video portraits of a wolf, a fox, and a lamb with a score that is composed of music by Coco Rosie, and readings of the original fable by Italo Calvino’s daughter Giovanna Calvino and her friend Isabella Rossellini. The portraits form a triptych that are linked to each other and synced to the score. To help maintain the autonomy of each portrait and yet create an intimate grouping, Robert Wilson and architect Filippo Moretti designed a room with angled walls, built within one of the stables of Villa Panza.

Iconic artist and theater director Robert Wilson has created a series of video portraits of celebrities, ordinary people and animals called "VOOM Portraits." Known for his glacier-paced theatrical productions with Tom Waits and Lou Reed, Wilson's now bringing his aesthetic to a video format. The recent developments in HD technology have allowed Wilson to create something like a precise hybrid of still photography and motion pictures. Actors such as Brad Pitt (as a crazy person on the streets in the rain), Isabelle Huppert (as Greta Garbo), Steve Buscemi (as a mad butcher chewing gum on a variety show), Robert Downey Jr. (as a dreaming corpse in a Rembrandt painting), and Winona Ryder (as Winnie, the main female character in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, buried up to her neck in sand) were asked to “think of nothing" and move slowly and steadily to collaborate in Wilson's vision of who they might be.

Documentary from Katharina Otto pays homage to famed stage designer Robert Wilson, who overcame childhood learning disabilities growing up in Waco, Texas, and rose to become one of the most respected avant-garde artists in late 1960s New York. As much a tale of social injustice as a portrait of an artist, this mix of interviews and live performance is testimony to how Wilson's early challenges influenced his creative expression.

John Eliot Gardiner conducts Gluck’s 1776 French version of “Alceste” at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. Soprano Anne Sofie von Otter takes the title role of Alceste, Queen of Thessaly, who offers to die at the hands of the gods in place of her husband, Admète (Paul Groves), so that the people will not lose their king. Alceste is then saved from the underworld by Hercule (Dietrich Henschel).

A collaboration in which Robert Wilson and Heiner Müller let Molière die, imagine his death in tableaux with text passages recited by Müller himself. "Cinema watches Death at work." Wilson's actors watch Molière die: their vigil is hard work. Müller's comment: "The poem watches a dying man at work, his name is Molière. The poem is not a film. The film watches an actor playing a dying man called Molière."

US stage director Robert Wilson has teamed up with pop star Rufus Wainwright to bring Shakespeare’s sonnets to the stage in Berlin. Debuting on Easter Sunday, this highly stylized cross-dressing version of the archetypal love poems went down a storm with the audience.

Film recording of Robert Wilson’s stage production of the opera by Gluck. John Eliot Gardiner conducts Berlioz’s 1859 revision of Gluck’s opera “Orphée et Eurydice” at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. Soloists Magdalena Kožená, Madeline Bender and Patricia Petibon are accompanied by Gardiner’s regular chorus, The Monteverdi Choir, and the 19th-century period instruments of the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique.

The creative processes of avant-garde composer Philip Glass and progressive director/designer Robert Wilson are examined in this film. It documents their collaboration on this tradition breaking opera.

This seminal work of avant-garde opera from composer Philip Glass and director Robert Wilson arrives full-circle, coming to France, the site of its 1976 Avignon Festival world premiere, at the tail end of this 2014 revival tour for a landmark Theâtre du Châtelet production and a first ever filming by award-winning arts filmmaker Don Kent. Eschewing conventional narrative, the opera revolves loosely around pacifist Einstein’s relationship to the creation of the atomic bomb.

A somber, menacing woman washes white dishes and a gleaming carving knife, pours milk into a glass, and then slowly attacks first one young boy and then another. Not a word of dialogue is uttered.

Stations is an enigmatic, hauntingly vivid work, in which Wilson envisions the daydreams and fantasies of an eleven-year-old boy as a universe both magical and sinister. Resonating with Wilson's precise visual stylization, the tape's pivotal image is a young boy looking through a large window in the kitchen of his home, which becomes the portal for his dramatic, often startling inner fantasies. Fire, metal, wind, glass and water, among other elements, serve as points of departure for a series of elegant pictorial compositions and evocative metaphors. Unfolding without dialogue or spoken language, Wilson's indelible visions articulate the fear and mystery of the internal life of a child, and his relation to the outside world.

Produced in an era before 24-hour programming cycles, Video 50 was initially used as a late night filler on TV stations in Germany, France, Belgium, and Switzerland. Random, surreal, and unexpected, Video 50 resembles the dream cycle of a dormant TV station after it conscious programming has ceased. Its structure and form anticipate the dissociated sequence of moving images we are now accustomed to encountering on YouTube and social media.

Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars is an in-depth documentation of Robert Wilson’s ambitious attempt to stage an epic, twelve-hour, multinational opera for the 1984 Summer Olympics. Filmmaker Howard Brookner follows the avant-garde theatre director as he confronts a hectic work schedule, funding difficulties and relentless international travel in attempt to complete his preparations. The film examines Wilson’s unique theatrical style during The Civil Wars: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down, which involves the continual creation of evocative stage sets, owing to a unique juxtaposition of movement, sound, text and image. Known for his precise, painterly images Wilson’s work derives more from visual art than the orthodox literary traditions of theatre. As a result, Wilson often challenges actors to perform in a boldly minimalist style, as well as collaborating with non-actors, such as young autistic poet Christopher Knowles in Einstein on the Beach.

When Robert Wilson was a child, he told his teacher he wanted to be a king. The film takes this premise as a point of departure to explore the figure of monarchs through the lens of the theatre of the absurd (Gogol, Jarry, Beckett). A satirical triptych that reflects on the philosophical condition of being in power.

Giuseppe Verdi based his famous opera on the novel “The Lady of the Camellias” by Alexandre Dumas. Robert Wilson’s production of Violetta Valéry’s tragic fate is his first work at the State Theater of Linz, Austria, one of the most modern operatic stages in Europe by architect Terry Pawson. After the run in Linz, the production was transferred to the Opera House in Perm, Russia, where the production was conducted by Teodor Currentzis. In 2017, the work received a “Golden Mask”, the most prestigious Russian theater award, in three categories (Teodor Currentzis, Best Conductor; Nadezhda Pavlova, Best Female Singer; Robert Wilson, Best Lighting Design).

Known as a creator of astonishing images, stage director and visual artist Robert Wilson delivers a magnificent production of Mozart’s adaption of Handel’s Messias. Mozart was commissioned by Gottfried van Swieten to modernise the score fifty years after Handel’s popular composition (1742), mainly by arranging the wind parts and partially re-composing them. With Marc Minkowski a conductor has been engaged who understands perfectly how to combine baroque style with the tonal possibilities of an orchestra of the classical period like the Musiciens du Louvre. The excellent soloist quartet with Elena Tsallagova, Wiebke Lehmkuhl, Richard Croft and José Coca Loza merges perfectly into Wilson’s enormous flood of images.

After twenty years of absence, Puccini’s Turandot was revived on the stage of the Teatro Real in a new production by American stage director Robert Wilson. One of the most important theatre and visual artist of our times, the director who gave life to Philip Glass’s Einstein of the Beach and who reinvented Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande hadn’t worked on a Puccini opera in twenty-five years, since his ground-breaking Madama Butterfly commissioned by the Paris Opera in 1993. This new encounter between his powerful visual universe and Puccini’s evocative music was bound to be an outstanding event. Carried out by a brilliant cast of singers, dominated by Irene Theorin as Turandot, Gregory Kunde as Calaf and Yolanda Auyanet as Liù, this magnificent production is conducted by the Teatro Real’s associate musical director Nicola Luisotti – and has been met with universal acclaim.

A full recording of an all-night performance of Robert Wilson's The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin: An Opera. Recorded on December 21, 1973. In many ways a compilation of all the stage work Wilson had done with the “Byrds,” The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin reworked elements of The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud, Deafman Glance, Overture, and KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE into a seven act, 12-hour piece.

Rinaldo Alessandrini, one of the most eminent baroque and pre-baroque music specialist, conducts Monteverdi's Orfeo, performed by singers who have been working with the Maestro for many years, and who now play in the middle of Robert Wilson's fairy sets...

Debussy's masterpiece, for the first time conducted by the Paris Opera's music director Philippe Jordan, in the fairy staging by Robert Wilson. When Prince Golaud, grandson of King of Allemonde, meets the beautiful Mélisande, he knows nothing about her. Though, he marries her. A few months later, Golaud announces his wedding to his brother Pelléas, who seems to be falling in love with the woman.