Robert M. Wilson, acclaimed theater and opera director, visual artist, and founder of the Watermill Center, died on July 31, 2025 in Water Mill, New York, at age 83, following a brief but sudden illness. His radical work reshaped the very definition of live performance.
It was a silent seven-hour production that first made France fall in love with Bob Wilson. Deafman Glance, born from a moment of trauma—Wilson witnessing a young deaf boy being beaten by a police officer—would become a landmark of modern theater. Wilson later adopted the boy. When the show premiered at the Nancy Festival in 1971, poet Louis Aragon was so moved he wrote, “I have never seen anything more beautiful in this world since I was born.”
Born October 4, 1941 in Waco, Texas, Wilson grew up in a conservative town without theater or museums. A childhood stutter drove him toward non-verbal expression—movement, rhythm, stillness. Dance and architecture shaped him. But it was light, his true medium, that became his lifelong signature.
After moving to New York in his twenties, he entered the avant-garde scene, collaborating with Andy Warhol, John Cage, and Martha Graham. In 1976, he partnered with composer Philip Glass to create Einstein on the Beach, an epic five-hour opera with no plot, no conventional characters, and no intermission. The piece remains one of the most influential works of experimental performance.
“Bob and I began collaborating in 1973,” Philip Glass said. “What started as a natural partnership became a lifelong artistic bond.”
Wilson’s stage productions—Peter Pan, Turandot, Orlando with Isabelle Huppert—were visually pure, geometrically precise, and poetically slow. His language was silence, light, gesture. He worked with Tom Waits, Lady Gaga, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and created video portraits shown at the Louvre.
While widely respected in the U.S., it was in France that Wilson found true artistic belonging. He inaugurated Paris’s Opéra Bastille in 1989 and became a regular at French festivals and opera houses. “The French gave me a home,” he told AFP in 2021.
In 1992, he opened the Watermill Center, a creative laboratory on Long Island that welcomed emerging artists and collaborators from around the world. During the Black Lives Matter protests, the center held a major exhibition honoring George Floyd.
Bob Wilson leaves behind a legacy of discipline, beauty, and boundless imagination—a master of stagecraft who taught us to see through silence and listen through light.
With AFP
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