In Memory of Robert Wilson

In Memory of Robert Wilson

“It has to be…sadder, Bob, it’s not saaad enough…make it…slow…er, much slow…er, just much slow…er”
— Jack Smith to Robert Wilson following a rehearsal of The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud (1969) according to Richard Foreman

Adrienne Edwards: In a way, it made me think about the use of dramaturgy in your work. Now, did you study theater?

Pope.L: Mhm. But not in a traditional school situation. I mean, I wrote plays probably since, you know, I was undergraduate, but they were odd-shaped things.

AE:  What do you mean by that? Odd-shaped things.

PL: They were handwritten. I had this thing about handwriting. They weren't memorized. I refused to have them memorized. So in a way, I was breaking certain conventions of theater and I didn’t understand how, like, once I worked in the theater department for 20 years, I didn't realize that that was really bad. They really are against that kind of shit. You memorize stuff, you don't handwrite anything, or everything has its place. It's very hierarchical, business. And film is the same way, the film business. I mean when I was younger I had these “issues” with theater and “issues” with the film context. Now I can see it could be helpful. If you work with the right people they understand that no matter what job you have, you're always bleeding into the other job. That's really the real deal no matter what your contract says. But you have to work with the right people. I don't know. I don't know. Over time, I just… I lost it.

AE: Well I think this notion of dramaturgy that I've been trying to understand...Yeah, go, you remembered.

PL: So, yeah, because the thing is in theater, how do you say, my exposure to dramaturgy first came through Robert Wilson, the theater director and how he uses dramaturgs. Wilson, I don't know if you know his work.

AE: I do.

PL: Or any of you. You know he's dyslexic. He has really bad dyslexia. I mean, the guy can't read. I mean he can, but he'd rather not. That's why his theater is so image driven. Part of it's because that's where his strength is. I mean, the guy's really good at image manipulation and he just went where his strength is and was so smart, in a way. And not be afraid of it. But he's even smarter because he surrounds himself with people who can read, and who are linear, and he's not ashamed of it. He's really good at people, material, and time. But he's worked that out over the years. So it was through him that I really realized the power of dramaturgy…I was teaching him. I taught him for a number of years, and like most people you get caught up in the imagery. At first I just thought, well, Glass, Einstein on the Beach, Wilson, I don't know, little albums, people carry the album around with them and it would be all tattered and stuff. I stayed away. Once I started really looking at his practice, for example, I guess the first thing I admired from his work is how he funded his work. He funded his work as a visual artist, working with Paula Cooper. I thought it was super smart, I mean forget grants, forget begging someone to do this for you, you can build your own situation. You don't have to depend on if you're going to get the grant this year or not. You can just go ahead and do your thing. That I thought was really smart, really DIY, very organized that way. The drawings were, some of them very beautiful, but it was—you took your fate out of the hands of those with money. That was actually the first, the dramaturgy thing came later when I actually started studying his method and found that here's a guy who very clearly that I have this neurological issue, but I have found a way to get around it, in a way, but make my work through it in a way, in a way. It was over a certain period of time of gradually seeing that there’s this person who has some of the same interests, issues that I have but is just doing it differently.

This text is adapted from Pope.L and Adrienne Edwards,  “New Circuits: Curating Contemporary Performance,” a conversation presented at the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN, September 29, 2015).