Robert Wilson is an
American-born director whose productions are
notorious for their huge-scale
designs and even huger-scale running times. He began as a
visual artist, and this influence has carried heavily into his work on the stage. Some of his
plays have run over
24 hours, and it may literally take all night for a
character to cross from one side of the
stage to the other. He has worked often with
Philip Glass as well as
Tom Waits, and he usually works in
Europe because
theatres there have much bigger budgets and the
artistic trends seem to be a little more
out there. His
artistic process often involves collecting
random ideas, objects, pictures, texts, etc - contributed by cast members, designers, or found in the
u-bahn that morning - and layering them on top of the original work; then the layers are peeled back over and over again, like an onion with nothing at the centre.
Amongst his works: