ROBERT WILSON |
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THE DAYS BEFORE
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“If the island rose in the past, it was
the place he had to reach at all costs. In that unhinged time he was
not to find but to invent the condition of the First Man. He would find
that a new language could be born from a new contact with creation.
The bay, alas, is too yesterday.”
Umberto Eco The Island of the Day Before(excerpt) The third work of a trilogy begun in 1979 in Berlin, with the second part created in 1987, this piece premiered in 1999 in New York City with a cast of almost 40 actors, dancers and singers from all over the world. Mr. Wilson has described the piece as being for him a sort of dreamscape that has as its themes apocalypse and redemption. |
Each of its twelve scenes tells its own story with no overt reference to the other scenes – the themes for the scenes came from sources as diverse as the Bible, the tales of Edgar Allen Poe, a newspaper article about an old woman’s suicide, historical incidents. They are unified by Mr. Wilson’s staging and use of visual elements,
by the text taken from Umberto Eco’s The Island of the Day Before,
and by the music of Ryuichi Sakamoto. Additional text comes from a
series of “Tone Poems” written and performed by Christopher
Knowles. |
PRODUCTION DATES |