Silence cast a transfixing half-hour spell at a memorial in Brooklyn for the late theater visionary Robert Wilson, who passed away this summer at the age of 83. The gathering on Saturday was set in the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) Harvey Theater, a poetically well-worn part of the institution, which played home to 22 productions by Wilson over the years—including two runs of his 1975 operatic masterpiece Einstein on the Beach.
The first of four public memorials, with others planned in the coming months for Berlin, Milan, and Paris, brought out luminaries including Philip Glass (the composer and co-creator of Einstein), Rufus Wainwright, Laurie Anderson, ANOHNI, Christopher Knowles, Joan Jonas, and Paula Cooper. None of them made a sound (or at least a sound with any intentionality behind it) during the main part of the program: a period of silence of the kind that Wilson made a recurring feature of his lectures, toasts, and addresses at other forms of assembly.
In a pamphlet handed out to attendees was a quote from John Cage: “There is no such thing as silence.” After that, a prompt: “For his own Memorial, Bob requested a long, very long period of silence. In this time, we invite you to listen to what you hear, to see what you see, pray, meditate, sit, remember, or imagine. The silence is not empty. It is full, resonant and alive. And perhaps, within it, one last message from Bob.”
That last message was suitably subtle and stirring. Advance materials had made it known that a period of silence was on the bill, but no further details were given. So it was more than a little dramatic when the silence started seemingly on its own, in an organic manner. No one knew how long it would last, but it held—and offered a lot of space for reflection. Thirty minutes of silence is a lot of silence, and it occasioned thoughts of what it means to gather as an “audience,” in an actual theater setting, to share attention in any one given point of focus, no matter what that focus is. Per Wilson’s design, presumably (he had sketched out details for his memorial in the final weeks of his life), the lighting in the theater slowly shifted from white to yellow and back again. At one point, the recorded sound of a telephone rang through the theater’s PA, before fading out—one last unanswered call.
After 30 minutes, William Campbell, chairman of the board of Wilson’s interdisciplinary Watermill Center on Long Island, stood up from his seat and walked to a podium. “Thanks to our host and a special thanks to all of you for your silence,” he said. “It could not have been a more appropriate gift for Bob Wilson on today, his birthday.”
Campbell spoke of the first time he saw Wilson’s work, after he moved to New York from the wilds of Saskatchewan, Canada. “There wasn’t a lot of garde, let alone avant-garde, in my upbringing on those flat Canadian prairies. But when I did come to New York I came to BAM and very soon thereafter saw Einstein on the Beach.”
He spoke of Wilson’s upbringing in Texas. “Bob’s drawl softened with the years, but he showed his true Texan contrarianism when he went on to say, ‘When you know what to do, do the opposite.’”
Of Wilson’s lifelong outlook, Campbell said, “His objective was to tap into the richness of every moment and feel deeply what is around us, what came before us, how the past can be a building block for the future.” Citing loving words from his spouse, he added, “Bob took everyone he touched, whether an artist, a carpenter, a gardener, richer or poorer, into a magical world.”
Joseph Melillo, executive producer of BAM from 1999 to 2018, followed with a paean on the part of the institution, whose relationship with Wilson began with his work The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud in 1969 and continued through other productions including Time Rocker with Lou Reed and The Black Rider with Tom Waits and William S. Burroughs, both in the 1990s, among many others.
The afternoon came to a rousing close with Josette Newsam, a singer who worked with Wilson on Zinnias: The Life of Clementine Hunter (2013), about a self-taught artist from a southern plantation who started painting after 50 and continued through her death in 1988 at the age of 101. “He really brought me out of my shell as a young church girl who was very sheltered,” Newsam said of Wilson. “He taught me how to break off my walls, which were really a cage, and become the person I was supposed to be.”
After that she sang. The audience clapped and sang along.
