In a little less than two decades, Robert Wilson has become an established phenomenon on the European theatrical scene, mainly with his large-scale, slow-moving, meticulously organized total spectacles, in which he has been responsible for virtually all the creative aspects--script, staging, designs, lighting. The production of his Deafman Glance in 1971 at the theater festival in Nancy opened the door at a time when French cultural authorities were beginning to be hospitable to the New York avant-grade in all the arts. Einstein on the Beach, his celebrated "operatic" collaboration with the composer Philip Glass, was financed largely by a commission from the French Cultural Ministry; it was first performed in 1976 at the Avignon Festival, and then at the Autumn Festival in Paris.
Mainstream Work
In recent seasons, however, Wilson has moved more into the theatrical and operatic mainstream by staging established works for established theaters--a double bill of Medeas, one by the French Baroque composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier, the other by the contemporary composer Gavin Bryars, at the Opera de Lyon; Euripides' Alcestis for the American Repertory Theater, a production also imported by the Paris Autumn Festival two years ago; Hamlet Machine and other pieces by the East German playwright Heiner Mueller, and Richard Strauss' opera Salome at La Scala in Milan. Now, thanks to an offer from Rudolph Nureyev, the Paris Opera's ballet director, Wilson has made his debut as a choreographer with a new production of Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien, a strange and unclassifiable collaboration by Gabriele D'Annunzio and Claude Debussy that manages to keep a tenuous and infrequent place in the repertory mainly because of its music. Wilson's production was given a series of performances from March 30 to April 16 at the MC 93 theater in suburban Bobigny (coproducer with the Paris Opera), and is scheduled for four performances July 7, 8, and 9 at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York during the Paris Opera Ballet's forthcoming tour in the United States.
It is a little misleading to say that Wilson was making his debut as a choreographer--more precisely, he shared program credit for the choreography with Suzushi Hanayagi, a longtime collaborator. And in a sense, Wilson has always been a choreographer. His is a theater of images, in which position, movement, visual composition, and gesture play a predominant role. He has always been influenced by the world of dance, as well as by Japanese classical theater, with its highly formalized dance forms. Wilson was also credited with the mise-in-scène, sets (with Xavier de Richemont), and lighting (with Howell Binkley).
Whoever was responsible for what, this turned out to be a spectacle of almost hallucinatory power, rich in dreamlike imagery and symbolism that seemed to touch the essence of this elusive work. What is more, Wilson drew performances of extraordinary technical prowess and dramatic involvement from three stars of the Paris Opéra Ballet--Sylvie Guillem, Michaël Denard, and Patrick Dupond. The choreography, which hovered in a no-man's-land between a classical vocabulary, modern and post-modern dance, and kabuki, held its interest with unexpected and expressive sequences, which both took advantage of the dancers' technique and stretched it in new directions.
Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien (The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian) is an unusual hybrid work with a curious
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