sarma

Everything that happens in Robert Wilson's plays is something you should have known but probably forgot. All glory to our collective unconscious. "Overture for Ka Mountain and Guardenia Terrace, a story about a family and some people changing" didn't begin in a theatre but in his loft building. He takes you into his world (from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. or from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. and lunch and exhibits in between), and his world is everything you see there. It is the chopped, unbranching birch grove in the hallway; it is the tryptych biographies of performers, overlaid with photographs, graffiti, cabalistic signs -beautiful as unburied temple tablets; it is the doweled, fresh wood pyramid with the layered cityscapes on glass deep within its heart; it is the onion that is slowly peeled away to nothingness by the slim black fingers that belong to the beautiful black child/woman in the white Edwardian gown; it is the matter-of-factness of two children in white sailor hats who change the props. It is a world in which the daily miracles of stone, wood, fire, water, birth and growth and death are celebrated in many ways -hidden and accessible.

Everything grows up as if Wilson and his collaborators had scattered handfuls of seed which would burgeon into the right event at the right time. For instance, there are sea seeds that produce surprising flowers: Edwin Denby in a distant corner looking like an ancient mariner buffeted by a storm; a man and a boy rowing on the balcony rail; a sea captain holding a model ship; ancient maps hanging in the hall; an engulfing wave of fabric; a boy/woman musing beside an anchor. Miracles are everyday happenings. A large woman in black velvet marked with silver triangles stares from the doorway of the pyramid at a dead pine branch on a pile of stones and it bursts into flame. Later a cardboard city catches fire while a mountaineer violinist plays with beautiful intensity a small range of notes clustering around one tone, and a girl trickles water from a pitcher to a bowl. Flamingos dance up through slits on the floor, and elephant heads unfold from the pyramid, which is really a ziggurat maybe, is the Tower of Babel because of the holocaust of tongues that someone speaks from underneath it, directs at it from the balcony. "Quiet please, a berry is breaking." While Edwin Denby reads, a girl with his white hair, blue shirt, brown sweater stands behind him, reading over his shoulder.

From the tragedy of a pile of dead soldiers to the comedy of Edwin Denby frightened up a ladder by a firmly roaring lion/man while he continues to read aloud from Nijinsky's diary about vegetarianism and love of animals, to the hominess of a big woman talking about Iowa or Wilson's grandmother recalling her life in a faded but sweetly vigorous voice, to the ritual of a dervish, to the mad violence of the lunge with which Wilson lays withered gladioli across a table, to ... I expected the heavens to open, and maybe they did.

In far retrospect I can sometimes ponder and evaluate Wilson's works. I can say now that I liked "The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud" better than "Deafman Glance." But the pieces are trance-begun, and they leave me in a trance for a long time.