ROBERT WILSON

“With Bob the ‘Secrets’ and the ‘Rooms’ bring you back to Greek tragedy, the mother of the theatre and of secret, in a woman’s form.

With Bob an installation is theatre, via a metaphor, ever. ‘A Mental Landscape.’ ‘The Room is the Mind.’ I have glimpsed pillars becoming tree trunks, and a bed on the stage, toy-sized. The spell is born, the spell I know, and it will seize the public as, one by one – the door is narrow – the spectators enter the scene, captured in a face-to-face dialogue with the space and the actor – the actor, ever-present, for hours, a clock, among comings and goings.”
Lisa Ponti

This installation-performance was part of an exhibition called Stanze e Segreti (Rooms and Secrets) that was housed in the Rotonda della Besana, one of Milan’s most beautiful historical buildings.

The theme, rooms and secrets, or an artist’s interpretations of the domestic space and its hidden sides, inspired Robert Wilson to create a strange, eerie forest in the room given to him. On entering through the narrow door, the visitor was first struck by the sight of enormous tree trunks rising out of mist up into the darkness, so huge and tall that not a single branch could be seen, growing out of the dirt floor of a forest. On looking more closely, the visitor would find a tiny white bed floating above the forest floor, and high in the distance the light of a tiny window.

The air was filled with strange noises, wind, and fragments of a text from Kleist’s Pentesilea spoken by Edith Clever. An actress in a formal, old-fashioned dress walked endlessly in a pattern through the trees, sometime resting against a trunk, and the subtle and constantly changing lights underlined the contrast between man and nature, security and loss.

PRODUCTION DATES
Milan, Italy, Rotonda della Besana
11 April – 20 August 2001

Credits
Robert Wilson
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