Bitef

ding realism and surrealism at the same time, giving them an as yet unthought of future, but I might as well quote for you what you haven t read with your own eyes; »Perhaps«, said I, «we’ve arrived at the time when the novel should leap over the infernal river and penetrate the domain of the unimaginable, become conjecture in order to contribute to the progress of the human spirit, hasten the transformation of man and nature. Perhaps we are at the time of a great confrontation in which the novel will dare what the most advanced in science can only perceive. Perhaps it is the novel which, in the future, will sound the trumpets which bring down the walls, the limits, and thereby we will penetrate man, this impregnable Jericho, father than man will ever go in the astral spheres . . . I was speaking for my saint in the still standing walls of the sanctuary. Here access is given us in another way into the fortress, in the deafman world of Bob Wilson and a little boy. The spectacle, for what else can I call it? It is neither ballet, nor mime drama, nor opera (although it is perhaps a deaf man’s opera, a deaf opera, as if we were at this moment in a world like sixteenth century Italy which had seen Cardan and watched the birth from Caccini to Monteverdi, l’opera serio, baroque of the ear, passing from the vocal counterpart of religious chants to this new form of art, profane in its essence) . .. the spectacle is reminiscent of new ways of light and shadow, or reinvented machines from before visual Jansenism, as well as the chairclock that measures time vertically during the spectacle is like a human mechanism replacing the pendulum, made human by a runner in the background. It all seems to criticize what we are used to. All is experiment. All the way the game left free to those which I won’t call dancers nor actors, because they are all that and something else: experimenters in a science still nameless, that of the body and its freedom. The spectacle tells the story of a deficient child, and thereby goes beyond (ahead) in this domain where it touches, medical science; it writes with moving characters men and women; and color plays a part, blacks among the whites; and the monsters have a preponderant part. The spectacle is of a healing, our own, of » congealed art«, of » learned art«, or » dictated art.« It comes out of a special science, that of probabilities (I feel like saying improbabilities). It heals us, in the balcony, the orchestra, from being like everyone else, from not having the divine gift of the deafman, it makes us deaf through silence and, magnanimously, from time to time, gives us our ears for the music, where this muffled voice, from off-stage, rythums a strange and marvelous waltz from Strauss, counting: one-two-three, one-twothree, one-two-three, perhaps a quarter of an hour from the end of the first act. And I want to write, oh, blue temptation of white paper I of that strange proximity (a baroque of the future) of science and art which is precisely the key to this freedom which Robert Wilson demands for his art. There are (I heard recently on Nicholas Schaffer’s TV program, Schaffer is a sort of Bob Wilson in his domain of the marvelous future) lots of people, and not necessarily fools or monsters, who think that science may come to take the place of art, who fear the » robotization « of humanity in its sublime particularity ,and in a certain way I understand their fear of change in what they love. Like all those who shed tears because the moon, just lately, has lost its mystery. I understand them, but I don’t approve. AH scientific conquest is human

triumph, for man. His freedom is exercised beyond the fields which once were his: as pipes relieve man from going to the well, let’s not regret the beauty of the woman’s movements which drew the pail from the depths of the earth. Alan starts each day beyond himself, beyond his past, his errors and his discoveries. I say that for cybernetics, computers and the use of the atom and this still nameless thing of which, with no doubt in my mind, this spectacle I am writing of is the first dawning. Man moves away from his inventions. And it isn’t the perversion which can be made in the use of machines which should turn us away from them like, at the time of the first scientific revolution, some unhappy me were driven to break and destroy the machines which weren’t their enemies but the point of departure for their freedom. A play like »Deafman Glance« is an extraordinary freedom machine. It’s as such that I beg you to go see it, all of you who see and hear, all whose hearts beat at the mere word freedom. Never as here, from a dark hole in the theater, have I ever experienced the feeling, in confronting the spectacle of Robert Wilson, that if ever the world finally changes, and ceases to be this hell ones sees at the end of almost four hours on the stage, and it is the hell where there is the slag pit and the mine, that if ever the world changes and men become like the dancer I spoke of, free, free, free .. . it’s through freedom man will have changed. Freedom, radiant freedom of the soul and the body.

ARAGON

Translation by

Linda Moses,

with the assistance of

Jeart-Baul Lavergne

and

George Ashley

At Spoleto

The New York Times, June 22, 1974 SPOLETO, Italy, June 21 Robert Wilson continues to amaze. His A Letter for Queen Victoria, which has Just had its world premiere at the Spoleto Festival, is a further example of his ability to enchant, intrigue, stimulate, puzzle and disorient his public. Mr. Wilson calls his new theater piece an opera in four acts but what is going on in the Teatro Caio Melisso is certainly not an opera in any usual sense of the word. But then it is not a play either, and to call it a ballet is almost as perverse as calling it an opera. The truth is that Mr. Wilson is a great theatrical original, and his work does not encourage labeling. His last major work which it might be recalled lasted 12 hours —was The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin at New York’s Brooklyn Academy of Music. This was possibly the culmination of Mr. Wilson’s experiments in the elongation and manipulation of theatrical time, in making drama out of the possibility of extending the timing of actions and speeches rather than the usual practice of condensing them. In Queen Victoria Mr. Wilson

is still concerned with time, but he has moved into slightly different areas for his field of theatrical inquiry. The result is a leaner, sparser work than we have had before. It is more disciplined and more shaped. It lasts a morre three hours, and although it has no narrative structure (indeed, it has no narrative) there is a rhythmic shape to it that is a far remove from Joseph Stalin. It may even justify Mr Wilson’s calling his latest brainchild an opera. Queen Victoria which, naturally, has nothing to do with Queen Victoria—has a curious, static prologue, which, naturally, has nothing to do with the theater piece. It takes place in the basement of theater, and it is a theatrical environment. The participant (because audience member is not really the term) walks through a series of small rooms. He can stay in each room and contemplate, or he can wander on as he chooses. In each room there is a sort of setting, an actor and some kind of minimal action. Sometimes the actor is smoking cigar or talking in gibberish, suspended on a swing, or making gnomic pronouncements. In each of the rooms, which are cosily decorative, is a burning oil taper above which is suspended some kind of toy airplane. As one walks through these strange cubicles with their old contents, one feels like a visitor to a living exhibition. The pictorial arrangement and scenic atmosphere are remarkable and pervasive. The theater piece itself takes place two hours later. It has the same sense of pictorial beauty and other worldliness. Further, and this could also be noticed in the static prologue, Mr. Wilson’s new interest in words and language is apparent. The language is occasionally nonsequentially, and the effect aimed at seems to be, in Air. Wilson’s own phrase, like hearing an opera in an unknown language. Familiar phrases float up; we make certain dramatic connections, but we are outsiders watching a drama that we are in part making up ourselves in our own minds. Mr. Wilson nowadays also uses the poetic, sibylline phrase that might mean everything or nothing in rather the way of Gertrude Stein, but hangs in the air more like a question than an answer. Undoubtedly, the interest here is not literary. Take for example the second act, in which a group of World War I aviators find themselves in various postions of despair in front of a wall. The monotony is extreme, although comparatively brief, throughout a series of blakouts. Yet it is also somehow valuable. Mr. Wilson is showing us something about body groupings and the way they convey emotions that no ordinary staging could achieve. His third act here is another tour de force —a caf e ballet in which groups of white-appareled people silting at tables chatter madly and gesticulate, while being picked off at intervals by an unseen sniper. The formalism of the piece and the ludicrous inevitability of these nineteen-twenties figures with their cocktail chit-chat and unimportant doom are funny but touching. And always there is Mr. Wilson’s uncanny sense for the look of the stage. At almost any moment you are given a picture to carry away in the mind of your eye. Air. Wilson’s most serious make-believe will not be for everyone, any more than his excellent acting company, the Byrd Hoffman school of Byrds, will appeal to all as classic actors. Yet this » A Letter for Queen Victoria« has its own meanings and reverberations, and only the Queen 1 ictorias of this world themselves will be unamused, or even untouched by it.

Clive Barnes

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