Robert Wilson’s Chance Encounters

The Unstoppables is a series about people whose ambition is undimmed by time. Below, Robert Wilson explains, in his own words, what continues to motivate him.

When I first came to New York, I worked in an Italian restaurant as a waiter and was fired. Then I worked in another Italian restaurant, this time as a dishwasher, and that was a job I liked. I was very good at organization, and I organized the entire restaurant, the supplies and the dinnerware, and left everything in perfect order. The owner wanted to keep me. I think of something my mother used to say: If they ask you to jump two feet, jump five.

I had grown up in central Texas, in Waco, and I didn’t know anything about anything. I came to New York to study architecture and, basically, to see the work of George Balanchine. I tried going to Broadway theater, and I didn’t really like it; went to the opera and liked that even less. But Balanchine, I would try to go every night. He was the first big influence: the staging, the classical compositions. I still feel that, if anything of our culture exists 200 years from now, it will be Balanchine.

In order to support myself, I began teaching children with learning difficulties in and around New York City. By chance, I met this deaf boy who knew no words — he thought only in terms of visual signs and signals. I had always wanted to be a painter, though I was not a very good one, and I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to work in theater. But I began to see that I could do onstage what I could not do on canvas, and out of this experience of meeting and working with a deaf boy, I developed a theatrical piece titled “Deafman Glance.”

The entirety of it is seven hours long, and it is silent. It was not that well received. I thought that would be the end of it. By chance, Jack Laing, the director of the avant-garde Festival of Nancy, saw it and invited me to show it in France.

Much to my surprise, we had a tremendous success. The poet Louis Aragon saw it and wrote a letter to André Breton saying, “It is the most beautiful thing of my life.” Pierre Cardin also saw it and said, “I want to take it to Paris and show it 10 times.” We opened in a 2,000-seat theater, which rather quickly sold out. For the next five and a half months, this play that was silent played to sold-out houses.