And sad news crossed the ocean with black wings: the death of Bob Wilson. It was at dawn, without awakening from the dream, in his room of the Watermill Center, a place that he founded in 1992 as an interdisciplinary laboratory for the arts and humanities, a space conceived to risk doing what has not yet been done.
This July 31, just the day a new edition of the Open House of the Watermill Center – a more summer, opening its doors to the local community and visitors to freely travel their spaces, workshops, facilities and performances– We received the news. What was most excited – to unwill artists from all disciplines to experience – was not interrupted despite the fragility of recent days: they say he expressed his desire that the celebration events planned in Watermill were not canceled.
Maybe writing these words is now, for me, a form of comfort. But far from the dark darkness of an obituary, I do it with the will to celebrate its great legacy. Not only because of his unique way of doing theater, but, above all, for his particular approach of the viewer to the scene, discovering an unreal and different scenic gesture, made self -absorbed.
More than once I heard him quote Ezra Pound: “The stillness is the fourth dimension.” That must be and continue to be, while we remember its peculiar and eternal “Go!”like the one we often heard in the unmistakable trials Absolute Wilson When starting a diamond scene with all the light.
His friends enjoyed when in a meeting or desktop he delighted us with his care and admiration for Montserrat Caballé, interpreting with his gestures the dance of the seven veils of the opera Salomé by Richard Strauss, which he successfully presented at the Scala de Milan. Or when talking about its montage in Paris del Winter tripby Schubert, that fateful September 11, when the great Jessye Norman felt unable to sing. Bob managed to encourage her to go on stage, but within a few minutes she broke up crying. He stopped the music and, in silence, the public cried with her.
For Bob, a simple blank sheet was already a scenario where writing with its performative calligraphy, messages, posters, faxes … the paper, territory where to draw their personal constellations of letters drawn in different sizes, with intermittences and displacements.
In 2013 in New York we did an editorial collaboration with the poem Seven Daysby Mark Strand, that we accompany with my images and the calligraphic scenes of Bob Wilson, which made the poem dance with his lyrics. In 1971 I was not twenty years old when a program of The deaf look (The look of the deaf), then presented in Nancy, with great expectation. I still keep that image that I have now in front of me: an enigmatic young black, sitting in a synthetic composition, with a great black skirt and a crow in their hands.
Years later, in 1985, on the occasion of a theater congress, Bob Wilson was invited to Barcelona. Those days we met and a friendship was born that would last decades and continue.
My interest as a spectator has led me to follow its montages and exhibitions in many cities. At least more than forty years, that referent of the theater already proposed in his works that the spoken word gave way to nonverbal representations and affirmed that what he really did was structure architectural landscapes.
I was always fascinated by his fluid scenic intuition, which he often expressed through improvised storyboards on any sheet by hand. At the same time, it demonstrated a systematic rigor to plan their proposals with the intention of inviting the public to enter a state of contemplation and enchantment.
In 1986 Bob returned to Barcelona with the prologue of the fourth act of The Look of Sordathat he himself interpreted. On one side of the stage, a numb child. Bob, with black makeup face like his Victorian suit, crossed the scene in just over an hour with a glass of milk in his hand.
That night I had the opportunity to accompany him and today I find it difficult to forget the exasperation of the public before the past scenic slowness: he caused whistles, screams and even threw coins into the pit of the Teatre Grec de Montjuïc.
Over time, other memorable shows from Wilson and had a better reception. In March 2024, his version of The Messiah of Händel (Adaptation in German of Mozart), directed by the teacher Josep Pons. The public, standing, celebrated the function with braves and applause. On that occasion Bob recalled that the first opera theater that he stepped on in his life was precisely the Liceu in Barcelona, when he came to Europe of initiatory student trip.
I would not want to be reckless, but I cannot forget the scenic and poetic response that he gave years ago when they asked him how he would like his wake: “Under a mountain of broken glass and with very polished shoes”.