Whenever Tom awaits and his wife and long collaborator Kathleen Brennan praises – or writes apparently anything – it’s in Unique tone that has been a hallmark of his and their creative work for more than five decades.
The two acclaimed their friend Robert Wilson – The Experimental Theater Stage Director, Dramatist, Founder and artistic director of the Watermill Center, known for “Einstein on the beach”, “The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud” and more – who died on July 31 at the age of 83. The tribute follows below in its entirety.
When he does not say goodbye to our friend Robert Wilson
Over 40 years of loving bob and still surprises … His vodka brush of absurdity, Vaudeville, heart damage and forgiveness and imagination in the endless is still wet and paints backgrounds back behind the mirror for the small hours in the morning on his opening evening! We will always be interrupted in his course ……
No one could paint like Bob with light … He collaborated with large lighting designers as patiently, Arvous, took his detailed detailed visions and exact instructions on the days that became nights … He found all the things living between the membrane and Weathervane… ..
Bob was among the artists who see, know, hear and know the world in a way that most people do not experience it and want that experience to be shared and to connect others also submerged and hanging between the breath of life.
Bob set a course for the invisible portals in his imagination and gathered brave, adventurous, dedicated, talented and brilliant artists, and herds and dedicated and opened many hearts and eyes. Bob had to be brave, dictatorial, curious, constantly listening, shy, playful, fraudulent, strategic, flirtatious, decayable, political and willing to protect and continue against all doubt, critics, compass navigators, Naysayers well intended or not.
Bob was an absolute amethyst by an actor … a space that floats astronaut and to paraphrase Lewis Carroll’s queen in Alice, he regularly dreamed 6 impossible things before breakfast to the stage, paint, suit, to build, draw, perform, choreographer, film, design … … to light up in the life and darkness.
He could still make his mind as the surface of an evening together lake and then switch to scribbling dance – epileptic, musical, static and trans -like … he trusted and trusted his mice and created a field of concentration calm as a stoic monolithic stone rising from the rolling sea.
To get Bob, you must first believe in the dandelion flow in the Smokey pale light horizon beyond the pros scenium … then smooth out the blanket of the time and pour a bottle of ink on the emptiness and call its shape the title of your new show!
Always atune, to a finger, a face, a chin, one leg, a tear, a gesture, a shape, an ear, a branch, a child under the table, the stalk of flowering cactus … or an unplanned sneeze that lights on the Christmas lights as you say the word … .chlep! His actors ever play and skilled, on Bob’s suggestion and their imagination, would turn their bodies into the letter G or throw up their arms like the wings of a crow and open their mouths in a silent scream … Bob slowed everything, the actors moved as if under the water … The audience experienced a flower that blooms in real time.
Robert Wilson. Bob. Loved Bob. Biscuits and sauce bob, elegant bob.
And … with its down-home heart and pure prisms of light mind and a wild and evil Texas cacke that rips up yellow lighting in a black sky increase … forever Bob ….
Tom and Kathleen