Robert Wilson (1941–2025)

I REMEMBER BOB IN SCENES. 

In the 1970s I went to a lot of very long Bob Wilson performances, among them the legendary Deafman Glance (1970) and A Letter for Queen Victoria (1974). They lasted for hours; some were all night. I often watched from the top of the nosebleed balcony—sometimes wrapp­ed in a sleeping bag, the images onstage mixing with my dreams. Even now I’m not sure whether I dreamed something or saw it in a Bob Wilson performance. 

When I began as an artist, Bob was my teacher of the biggest things I was struggling to learn about: time, meditation, light, and theater. 

Once, a few years ago, I was walking across Fourteenth Street and I saw a very tall man who seemed to be standing in the middle of the sidewalk. There were two other shorter men next to him. As I approached them from behind, I had the feeling I was walking at triple speed, as if zipping past them on a moving walkway. As I passed, I saw that the tall man was Bob Wilson. “Hello, Bob!!” I said as I sped by. He smiled and made the short bird croak that he used as a laugh. “Lauuuuurie! Only four more hours to go!” It was then that I saw what was in front of us, hanging over the Hudson River at the end of the street: an enormous glowing orange ball, like something from an Egyptian myth. The sun. And then I remembered—it was Manhattanhenge, one of the two days a year that the sun aligns with Manhattan’s crosstown grid and seems to be setting in the middle of the street, glaring and gargantuan against its New Jersey background. I had forgotten that Bob often took a ritualistic slow walk from east to west on that day.

One of my favorite pictures of Bob shows him in the “Torch Dance” from Einstein on the Beach (1976). He’s wearing a dark jumpsuit and wielding two flashlights. Some of my all-time favorite Bob Wilson shows were solos, especially The Man in the Raincoat (1981). In 1997, when I was the director of the Meltdown Festival in London, I was thinking of this when I asked Phil Glass to perform an organ piece, and two men danced down the steep flights of stairs on either side of the stage. They were Bill T. Jones and Bob Wilson; they took ten minutes to spin, stagger, and pinwheel their ways down. Sometimes things happen and I think, “I can die right now, because life doesn’t get better than this.”

Bob was a neighbor in TriBeCa, his loft full of chairs—equidistant, as if ready for a conference on Covid, or maybe a chair museum. Chairs from all over the world mixed with long benches. In this memory, Bob is standing next to a mirror. Christopher Knowles is next to him, talking in his mechanical-typewriter voice.

I saw Bob more often in Europe than the United States. Mostly late at night, after a performance of one of his works. I can see him now in the glittering light of a German restaurant at the endless afterparty: white tablecloths, dark wood, bottles of vodka, art patrons in black.

I sat on Bob’s lap for hours after my husband, Lou Reed, died. Then he sat on mine. 

The performers in Bob’s operas walk without lifting their feet, the sliding walk of Noh drama, low center of gravity, a moonwalk, a slipping across the surface. Still and moving. It was the opera Einstein on the Beach that taught me about time warps. 

Why was it called Einstein on the Beach? According to Phil the title had nothing to do with Nevil Shute’s 1957 postnuclear novel On the Beach or the 1959 film with Ava Gardner, Gregory Peck, and Fred Astaire. In the late ’70s we did performances and sculpture on a landfill beach near Wall Street, a series called “Art on the Beach.” The working title for their opera was “Einstein on the Beach on Wall Street.” 

Once when I was thinking about this, I began to wonder if there was a relationship between Einstein and a beach. I had a vague memory about Einstein talking about how walking on the beach was a slippery game because the dry sand acted like minuscule ball bearings. Good theory! Could be the physics version of the way Bob Wilson taught actors to walk. 

Turns out the relationship between ball bearings and Einstein more likely refers to the use of a ball rolling on a curved surface to explain the concept of gravity in general relativity. I did, however, track down something Einstein wrote about the beach. He said that the easiest place to walk along the shoreline is near the water (where the sand isn’t too wet or too dry), something every beach walker knows, but he followed his explanation with a long description of the air-water interface working to pull the grains together.

Einstein on the Beach is about curved space, bent time, and light. But most of all, it’s about ecstasy.

Bob was extremely tactical. I remember sitting with him around a table during a meeting with people who were his potential backers. I no longer remember what project he was pitching. It must have been something I was involved in; maybe he was describing an early version of CIVIL warS (1984). Just for a moment, I looked away to try to gauge the reactions of the backers. When I looked back, Bob was gone. His chair was empty. Then I heard some frantic barking, and one of the backer’s arms began to jerk. I looked under the table. Bob was crawling around, barking a shrill, insistent, otherworldly sound and pulling on the pants legs of the backers. Probably just to make him stop, they all agreed to end the meeting and to support the opera. 

Bob was in a hurry. When Lou was working with Bob on Time Rocker (1996) and POEtry (2000), the workshops were songwriting factories. Bob would duck into the rehearsal studio: “Give me a song about a chandelier!” And then slam the door.

“No independent thinking!” he would yell to actors. Then he would put on an expression of the most elaborate Victorian cliché of exaggerated mock emotion. Then freeze, his mouth open in a silent scream.

Bob was a master of tempo, matching Phil’s lightning-speed music with glacial action onstage. Text and movement were also in counterpoint. Gestures never illustrated the words, but seemed to come from another world of signaling.

Other things:

His birthday messages to me, scrawled in what I call “Bob font,” with wiry Y’s and a mix of capital and small letters, in some sprawling hieroglyphics.

His devotion to John Cage and Gertrude Stein, who employed automatic techniques, leaving language to function more like motion and light, music, or a way of marking time. 

The time he took to light his productions. It could take three hours to perfect a pinspot on an actor’s raised finger. When I was doing performances in Aichi, Japan, in Expo 2005, Bob was there too, creating an event that I think was a huge snow monkey that was to rise up out of a lake. But Bob was so busy with productions all over the world that no one ever knew when he might arrive to work. The producer Hal Willner described how each night they had to prepare the entire snowman sequence in preparation for the lighting—a time that stretched into two weeks—and what the snowman looked like in the moonlight as they waited. Once, when Bob was working on four separate productions in Paris, he traveled between them at night in an ambulance, both for the speed and to catch some sleep.

During the pandemic I went to visit Bob at the Water-mill Center on Long Island. Watermill sits in eastern Long Island like an enormous stage set on the site of the former Western Union research facility. Designed to house and train artists working in all forms—particularly theater, dance, and the visual arts—it is filled with hundreds of the objects Bob collected from around the world. 

That haunted spring, the Watermill Center seemed like an abandoned castle. Bob was there with only one assistant when I stopped by for lunch. I said, “I want to thank you for the most amazing scene in an opera—it’s maybe my favorite scene. You know, the one that sort of summed up colonialism without using any words. It really changed all my ideas about how to put history into a story.”

He looked a little puzzled, so I continued: “You know . . . the one with the man in the bowler hat and the woman in the sari.” I described it to him, and as I did it became even more vivid. In this scene a British man stands on one side of the stage. He wears a bowler hat and tailored gray morning coat. He is using an umbrella as a walking stick. On the other side of the stage is an Indian woman: bare feet, pink sari, red bindi, long braid, exposed plump midriff. They walk toward each other in slow motion, as if they’re walking on ice. Just as they pass each other, the woman loses her balance and crumples in slow motion to the ground. The man bends over, offers his arm, and helps her up, then tips his hat. She straightens her sari and they continue walking. When they arrive at the sides of the stage they turn around and begin walking toward the center again, toward each other. They walk slowly, their feet gliding on the surface as if they were polishing the floor. When they get to the center the woman falls again and the man bends over stiffly. This time he pulls her up more quickly and places her upright. When they get to the side of the stage they turn and head to the center again. As they pass, she falls again. He picks her up again. This happens several more times, and each time the man picks her up it is with more impatience, then with more and more force until he’s yanking her up. By the last time she falls he’s beating her with his umbrella. And I thought: Amazing. Here it is: British colonialism in a nutshell.

Bob, who had been listening patiently, said, “I never did a scene like this.” As it turned out I’d made it up. Plays mix with dreams, then with your life. Eventually it’s hard to say what’s real. When you walk into Bob’s immense world of light and altered time, your life, your dreams, and your expectations are permanently altered.

We continued talking. “You know, I’m always going to other continents to play,” I said. “I’d like to stop traveling, maybe play with someone within walking distance.” He said, “Good idea!” and introduced me to a man named Shane Weeks, an artist and a member of the Shinnecock Native American tribe that has been on Long Island for about thirteen thousand years. The Shinnecock are whalers with a tradition of epic storytelling. The reservation was within walking distance.

I met Shane and several others who were dancers. We did a concert for Bob in the woods near Watermill. I fell into a trance, Shane’s voice high and pure. The concert was so quiet that the rustling sound of the leaves was louder than the music. Time passed and it didn’t pass.

Bob, sometimes I think of you this way: I don’t remember exactly what you said, or what you did. But I remember the way you made me feel. 

Laurie Anderson is an artist and writer living in New York.