Zitat des Tages von Robert Wilson:
If we lose our culture, we lose our memory.
To me, what is important in the theater is that we don't want to make a conclusion. We don't want to make a statement, don't want to say what something is. We want to ask, 'What is it?'
I never studied theatre; I learned it by doing it. If I had studied theatre, I would not be making the kind of theatre I am making.
In my theater, I'm not trying to change the world.
I grew up in a town where there were no galleries, no museums, no theaters - a very religious, ultraconservative community.
The mind is a muscle.
There hasn't been a great romance in my life.
It's important that we have the traditional operas and the repertory, but we should also have something new.
I say I like to be alone, yet I am always surrounded by people.
If you take a Baroque commode and put a Baroque clock on top of it, maybe it is not so interesting as when you put a computer on top of it. Then you see both items in a new way.
My theater is slow and calm, yet my life is fast and hectic, going in all directions.
Light is architectural. It is sculptural.
I've always thought abstractly - through theme and variations rather than narrative.
One of the few things that will remain of this time is what artists are doing. They are the journal and the diary of our time.
I think by drawing, so I'll draw or diagram everything from a piece of furniture to a stage gesture. I understand things best when they're in graphics, not words.
Most theater tells you what to think.
At the end of the 1960s, I was part of the downtown theatrical movement in New York that was making work in alleyways, garages, gyms, churches, non-traditional spaces. The idea was to get away from the illusion of the conventional theatre. But then I thought, what's wrong with illusion?
If you slow things down, you notice things you hadn't seen before.
I don't see anyone for the first hour and a half that I'm awake. I don't like to talk, and I don't like to hear any sounds. People know not to bother me! I use that time to read, and make lists and notes of things I have to do later in the day.
Some years ago, I was invited to speak in Houston, Texas. They said I was a founder of 'postmodern theatre'. So I said to my office, 'This is ridiculous for me to go and speak about postmodern theatre when I don't know what it means, but... they're paying me a lot of money, so I'll go.'
Christopher Knowles, Buechner, Heiner Mueller, Burroughs, Chekhov, Shakespeare - it's all one body of work.
What was very interesting to me about Clementine Hunter's work is that she couldn't read or write, and she has recorded history of the plantation life and the southern part of the U.S. - the cotton harvests, pecan picking, washing clothes, funerals, marriages - in pictures.
The first year I was in New York, I met Martha Graham. She said, 'Well, Mr. Wilson, what do you want to do in life?' I was 21 years old, and I said, 'I have no idea.' And she said, 'If you work long enough and hard enough, you'll find something.'
By giving the leadership to the private sector in a capitalistic society, we're going to measure the value of art by how many products we can sell.
Most artists don't understand what they do, and I don't think we have to. Other people do that better - they understand what I do better than I do!
I met a 13-year-old black child, Raymond, who had never been to school and had never learnt any words, yet it seemed to me that he was intelligent. It became apparent after a short period that Raymond thought in terms of visual signs and movements.
I never thought about the relationship of my mother, my family, to the content of my work.
The reason you work as an artist is to stay open and ask questions.
I had no idea I was going to have a career in the theater. I did not plan it.
When I was 12 years old, I went to Natchitoches, La.; it was summer vacation with my family. We visited a plantation, Melrose. And I met an Afro-American woman who was a painter. I already had some idea of what I wanted to do in life, and one of the things that interested me was painting.
I had dinner with Marlene Dietrich in the early 1970s. I went to pick her up and she had someone with her, a dreadful man. He was writing a book about her, and he said to her, 'You're so cold when you perform,' and she said, 'You didn't listen to the voice.' She said the difficulty was to place the voice with the face.