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Статья про "silent operas" Уилсона из NYT 1973 года. Какой же уютный и расслабленный стиль был возможен в газетах когда-то.

WHY are Robert Wilson's plays called operas?

Well, he first called them plays, but when the French saw them, they called them operas, silent operas‐‐maybe because that suggested a spectacle ‐‐ and the term “opera” stuck.

When I went to Wilson's “The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud”—that was four years ago at the Brooklyn Academy ‐‐ I didn't know anything about Wilson and I started to watch it as if it were some kind of realistic play—the people on stage were moving like realistic actors—and I became exasperated.

For instance, the actors did what they did very clearly and straightforwardly, but as if no audience were present. They didn't project or stress some details more meaningfully than others, the way realistic actors do, so you quickly catch on tO the dramatic situation and momentum and begin to anticipate. And the set was realistic enough ‐‐ a beach with a sky and deep, real sand on the floor, but some odds and ends were lying around, real but not realistic, like in front of the skydrop, a black rod hanging across the stage afoot above the floor with bunches of canvas tied to it, or like downstage a Gothic chair in the sand and :a woman sitting in it, motionless, holding a stuffed bird ‐‐ nobody on stage noticing her. Symbols? Well, it wasn't until the next play I found out who she was.

Wilson's actors didn't prosect and the action didn't gather momentum, it sort of stayed where it was at any Moment, The action on stage kept changing, but like a picture, not like a story. Luckily for me, eventually I started watching what was happening, the event, the way one watches the ballet, the clear paths and differences of speed, and then the active picture began to get more and more fascinating and spacious and wonderfully various.

Of course, in many ballets there is a minimum of projection and expressivity. Well, dancers move faster than real life, and Wilson's actors move slower—a different kind of imaginary time—perhaps like the time in a Wagnerian opera. But like at a ballet, I found had to scan the entire stage every once in a while to see what else was happening besides the event I was watching already.

Sometimes several events were in different stages of development at several different places. At other moments a brief solitary event happened in relation to the whole vast space. The changing visual world that Wilson was showing seemed like the magic architecture of a dance, and it included unintelligible props and references, the way some dances clearly do, allowing that freedom of uncertainty to your imagination. But anyway, I found that scanning the whole stage now and then was a great help to me when I got either angry or sleepy.

Question: How do you see the content existing in Wilson's works?

Well, the content in Wilson's pieces is that of images and I would like to call it visionary in that sense. And I think it was meant that way. It can be translated into psychological or narrative terms, into words, but it doesn't have to be. It can be taken directly as the images and pictures, as something that keeps changing in that sense like a dream. You don't ask what a dream means. Sometimes, later on, you know what a dream means. And sometimes you don't. But usually, you don't. But at any rate, while it's going on, you don't ask. You. . . .

But if it's a good dream—and Bob's pieces are, for me, sound dreams—I don't mean sound in the sense of noise, but in the sense of health, they are not nightmares. A lot of people prefer nightmares on stage, but I don't. And it's very difficult to make a dream that doesn't become a nightmare. It's much easier to force it into that and then it makes a big dramatic . . . and so forth.

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