Robert Wilson embodies the roles of director, set designer, scenographer, lighting designer, and architect in a single figure. Internationally celebrated as a pioneer of stage lighting and honored with numerous prestigious awards, including the Golden Lion of the Venice Biennale and the Praemium Imperiale, Wilson, now in his eighties, continues to travel the world, staging remarkable productions. His use of light and color is marked by precision and minimalism, creating scenes that skillfully oscillate between stillness and drama. During rehearsals at the Düsseldorf Schauspielhaus, he elaborates on the interplay between stage and architecture, his creative process, and the profound impact of light on darkness.
Wilson's educational journey began at the University of Texas and continued at Brooklyn's Pratt Institute, where he developed an interest in architecture and design. Upon moving to New York City in the mid-1960s, he became captivated by the groundbreaking work of choreographers such as Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham. His collaboration with composer Philip Glass, renowned for his minimalist and repetitive compositions, resulted in the landmark opera "Einstein on the Beach," which marked the inception of Wilson's international career in the late 1970s. Subsequent collaborations with Lady Gaga and performance artist Marina Abramović further demonstrate Wilson's interest in trans-disciplinary projects.
"To light a stage is to light architecture, it is all the same." This assertion is grounded in Wilson's architectural studies and his extensive stage experience: "Louis Khan said in a lecture when I was a first-year student at Pratt Instate 'Students, I always start with light first.' Often light is an afterthought, but it should be the first thought." Nevertheless, Wilson observes that this principle is seldom realized in practice: "Most architects build a building. But there are those like Tadao Ando or Louis Kahn. They started with light. But those architects are few."
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Wilson excels in building spaces with light and creating atmosphere using minimal resources. Subtle and meticulously calibrated brightness and color gradients, primarily in blue and grey, dominate the expansive backgrounds, imparting a sense of breadth and depth to the stage. For heightened dramatic effect, Wilson occasionally shifts the background to vibrant red or green hues. Scenes featuring pastel gradients are contrasted with rich, saturated colors. "I'm working with a whole palette of colors. It's full of colors.", Wilson explains.
The frequently white-painted faces, accentuated by narrow beams of light, resemble sophisticated masks against a serene backdrop in current productions such as "The Sandman", "The Jungle Book", "Dorian" or "Moby Dick" at the Düsseldorf Schauspielhaus. The actors' striking silhouettes in the foreground are set against a seemingly dematerialized horizon - evoking memories of James Turrell's Ganzfeld works with their dissolving background. Wilson's distinctive white lines of light delineate zones on the stage, indicate steps, define transitions, and subtly create depth in the dark surroundings.
The American scenographer has long regarded light as the fundamental medium for communication, as he explained in a 1995 interview with Dance Ink: "[I appreciate]…Hollywood portraits of the early 30s and those from Germany in the 20s where light performed as an actor, where every movement, every second was lit and sculptured, allowing us to hear and see more readily and intensely...Light in my work functions as a part of an architectural whole. It is an element that helps us hear and see, which is the primary way we communicate. Without light, there is no space."
Wilson's approach to light begins with darkness and the concealment of light sources, ensuring that the light effect, rather than the luminaires, takes center stage. "Firstly, you need to have theatres that can be made dark and you need materials that absorb light, that don't reflect light. Then I will always go to the brightest point, the brightest spot. I prefer that whatever lighting instruments I have are out of sight for the audience. Otherwise, my eye will go to the source of light. For the play Dorian I have the lights on stage that are being moved, and sometimes we move them in the face of the audience, but that's my intention there, that the instrument is seen. But generally, I prefer the old-fashioned techniques where you're working with a frame and you can hide everything within the frame."
Wilson often bases his composition of light and space on minimalist concept sketches. He captures spatial proportions and contrasts in brightness through small diagrams and develops the visual storyboard through a sequence of images. "I think by drawing it is as Tom Waits said 'it is a way of getting my arms around a work' ", Wilson notes. For him, drawing serves as a medium for better understanding rather than mere illustration, as he further describes: "Light on stage is different from light that I draw with my pen. But these are thinking drawings. I don't try with the stage set to reproduce what I did in drawing. It's a way of structuring and thinking time and space."
Wilson's enthusiasm for darkness presents significant practical challenges. This applies to both the auditorium and the stage. A darkened auditorium helps eliminate distractions and focus the audience's attention forward. "The first thing I do is work with the blackout" Wilson emphasizes. However, challenges frequently arise in the details and the theater's interior design: "And then you always have problems. If you're in interior spaces in theaters you have bright exit lights. But the theaters are often also built with the wrong materials. I did a piece in Athens at the opera house and I'm a big fan of Renzo Piano, but he made a terrible mistake. He made the interior of the opera house red. So, if you have an idea of Otello there, with the exit light it looks like a whorehouse. It's all red. There's no way you can get rid of the red. The curtains are red. The walls are red. The seats are red."
On stage, the key to achieving effective darkness lies in precise lighting control and the creation of appropriate contrast ratios. Wilson utilizes carefully aligned spotlights, with light beams tailored to specific areas, to create darkness alongside them. For Wilson, light intensifies darkness: "If I put a black object on a black background it is one thing and if I put a white object on a black background it reads more. The darkest moments in theatre need the most light. The light is the element that helps us to hear and see better. Light should be an active participant in drama and not be an afterthought. If you turn off all the lights and light a single glass of water, and you begin to recite Shakespeare the glass of water is an active participant. If you are King Lear and you have to play Lear in The Death of Lear, you need light or it will never be Shakespeare's great tragedy."
The evolution of lighting technology has significantly impacted Wilson's career. On the one hand, advances in lighting control have streamlined processes: "With the computer, you can run a loop that is three minutes long and within it, you've got 20 other cues. This is going at 15 seconds, that is going in 45 seconds. With the computer, you can easily do that."
On the other hand, new light sources such as HMI (Hydrargyrum medium-arc iodide) and LED have introduced changes compared to the properties of incandescent lamps, which were used extensively in stage lighting and admired for their warm light color when dimmed. Wilson notes the broader implications of these changes: "The biggest change is now you have these LED and HMI lights and they're always cold. That has changed drastically the whole palette of color... There are people now that are developing techniques with these horrible cold lights and we have to make them warmer. If I turn the lights on in the bathroom in a hotel you look like a monster."
This year, for the first time, Wilson is presenting a façade projection in an urban context to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Impressionism. The cathedral of Notre-Dame de Rouen serves as an ideal canvas for this endeavor. Claude Monet's series of paintings focused on light and its effects on this Gothic building, capturing various lighting conditions on different sections of the façade. Wilson's installation "Star and Stone: a kind of love ... some say" draws on this fascination with light, superimposing Monet's works with abstract paintings. With this installation, Wilson creates images of transience and change and uses the medium of light to convey a message of hope in times of crisis and war.
Light matters, a column on light and space, is written by Dr. Thomas Schielke. Based in Germany, he is fascinated by architectural lighting and works as a trainer for the lighting company ERCO. He has published numerous articles and co-authored the books "Light Perspectives" and "SuperLux". For more information check www.erco.com and www.arclighting.de.
