It was in the mid seventies and I asked Lucinda to be in my production of Einstein on the Beach, the opera that I created with Philipp Glass. Since then she has performed in a number of my works. Some years later in 1981 she asked me if I would do the lighting and set for a dance piece she was creating with music of Jon Gibson at the Kitchen. 40 years later – during the days of the isolation of pandemic – we decided to create a new work together and we thought to start from this memory. After a workshop in Toulouse in July and a second workshop in Rome we wanted to expand the early work that we did and suggestion came to choreograph Stravinsky’s Pulcinella. I liked the idea of Stravinsky being a central counterpoint to contemporary compositions of Jon Gibson and John Adams. So we have structured the work to be in three parts and make a full evening of dance, music, images and lights. I like the Stravinsky work. It’s a completely different world, different spectrum of colors, different and therefore structurally interesting to me. I dealt with the Pulcinella in the same way I always deal with existing works: I respect the master but then I don’t want to become a slave to the master, so I do it in my own way. All of my theater in a sense is a masque of music and text; the stage picture is something we see and what we hear is something different. In this way it is very classical, like in Greek theater, the actors were all masks, or in the Noh theater and the Bunraku from Japan, the Kathakali form India. I see in my work – all of my works – the stage imagery being a mask, and behind the mask we hear something. Although my work has changed in the course of the years – I first made theater in the late 60s, early 70s until today – but it’s always the same hand and the same body and it’s like a tree: sometimes it is in a storm or sometimes it loses its leaves but it’s always the same tree. All of my work is one thing in that sense. With Lucinda I share a common sense of time and a common sense of structure, and that’s very rare, so our collaborations in a sense are second hand, we don’t need to talk a lot because we think alike.

– Robert Wilson Rome, June 2022

I. Jon Gibson: “Rise” (1981) New World records

II. Knee play 1 – quotes from Nijinsky’s Diaries

III. Igor Stravinsky: “Pulcinella suite” (1922)
performed and recorded by > PMCE Parco della Musica Contemporanea Ensemble directed by > Tonino Battista

IV. Knee play 2 – quotes from Nijinsky’s Diaries

V. John Adams: “Light over water” (1985) New Albion Records