ROBERT WILSON

“My entire work is non-interpretative. Interpretation is not a responsibility of the artist, whatever he does, whoever he is, a writer, a painter, a dancer, a designer…. Interpretation is for the public. We certainly have some ideas about what we are doing, but we must not insist on them too much. We start working with a question: What am I saying? If we knew what we were doing, there would be no reason for doing it.”
Robert Wilson

A work originally staged to be performed within an installation created in a huge empty granary in Gibellina, a town in Sicily, it had a later incarnation in a very large abandoned warehouse in Weimar.

Taking as its starting point T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and the sources that inspired Eliot in his work, T.S.E. shows the influence of Greek mythology, the Romantic poets of the Middle Ages, the lives of St. Augustine and St. John of the Cross, Eastern religion, the works of Dante, Shakespeare, Baudelaire and other great artists from many countries and epochs.

A unifying theme throughout is the music of Philip Glass, composed specifically for this piece.

A unique theatrical event, the audience members upon arriving were given a small folding stool to carry with them throughout the evening, as the various scenes of the play unfolded in many different parts of the space, many scenes interpreted by two or three sets of performers simultaneously, leaving the viewer free to decide which version to watch and from what viewpoint. At other times the large company of performers joined to create one enormous scene, surrounding the viewers and filling the space with a barrage of images, movement, text, light and sound.

PRODUCTION DATES
Gibellina, Italy, Baglio delle Case di Stefano, 3 – 10 September 1994
Weimar, Germany, Kunstfest Weimar
Deutsche Erstauffuhrung Hetzerhalle
15 – 23 June 1996