Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan have shared a tribute to their friend and frequent collaborator, Robert Wilson, the renowned theater director, playwright, and artist, who died late last month at the age of 83.
“Bob was among the artists who see, feel, hear, and sense the world in a way that most don’t experience it and want that experience to be shared and to connect others also immersed and suspended between the breaths of Life,” Waits and Brennan wrote. “Bob set course for the unseen portals of his imagination and gathered brave, adventurous, devoted, gifted, and brilliant artists, and crews and devotees and opened many hearts and eyes.”
Wilson was renowned for his provocative productions, which were often built around his unique approach to staging, as opposed to dialog or narrative. He founded the Watermill Center, a self-described “laboratory for performance,” and collaborated with numerous luminaries at the avant-garde and pop nexus, including Lou Reed, Susan Sontag, Lady Gaga, Philip Glass, and William Burroughs.
Waits and Brennan were among his most frequent collaborators. In the late Eighties, Waits wrote the music for Wilson’s play The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets, later recording many of those songs for his 1993 album, The Black Rider. Similarly, Waits and Brennan wrote the music for Wilson’s 1992 play Alice and his 2000 production Woyzeck; the songs for those projects were eventually recorded for Waits’ albums, Alice and Blood Money, both of which arrived in 2002.
“Over 40 years of loving Bob and still he astounds,” Waits and Brennan wrote. “His vodka paintbrush of absurdity, vaudeville, heartbreak and forgiveness and imagination of the infinite is still wet and painting backdrops backwards behind the Mirror into the wee hours of the morning of his opening night! We will always be suspended in his orbit.”
The couple went on to remember the multi-faceted nature of Wilson’s creativity, calling him an “absolute amethyst of an actor … a space floating astronaut.” They celebrated his ability to come up with “6 impossible things before breakfast to stage, to paint, to costume, to build, draw, perform, choreograph, film, design … to light into Life and darkness.”
In a final flourish both fittingly poignant and idiosyncratic, Waits and Brennan ended by trying to encapsulate Wilson’s attentiveness, vision, and command of his craft: “Always attune, to a finger, a face, a chin, a leg, a tear, a gesture, a shape, an ear, a branch, a child under the table, the stalk of blooming cactus … or an unplanned sneeze that turns on the Christmas lights as you the say the word … SCHLEP! His actors ever game and skillful would, upon Bob’s suggestions and their imaginations, would turn their bodies into the letter G or throw up their arms like the wings of a crow and open their mouths in a silent scream … Bob s-l-o-w-e-d everything down, the actors moved as if underwater … the audience experienced a flower blooming in real time. Robert Wilson. Bob. Beloved Bob. Biscuits and Gravy Bob, Elegant Bob.
“And … with his down-home heart and pure prisms of light mind and a wild and wicked Texas cackle ripping up yellow lighting in a black sky desert … Forever Bob …”
Wilson died at his home in Water Mill, New York on July 31 after what was described in a statement as a “brief but acute illness.” The statement continued: “While facing his diagnosis with clear eyes and determination, he still felt compelled to keep working and creating right up until the very end. His works for the stage, on paper, sculptures and video portraits, as well as The Watermill Center, will endure as Robert Wilson’s artistic legacy.”