By Andy Battaglia
Robert Wilson is in Berlin, in a state of isolation like so many of us, but the storied experimental theater director has found himself in surroundings that allow for simple pleasures far away from his home in New York. “I’m staying in a house in private quarters surrounded by a garden and facing a lake, so I can go for walks in nature,” he said of the temporary location where he and his assistant are holed up. “No one is here. I don’t go out.”
He has, however, opened a portal of sorts in the form of a new online viewing room populated with mesmerizing video portraits he’s made over the years—including one of a Japanese kabuki dancer and another with Winona Ryder as a strange character in a Samuel Beckett play. More will be added in time, all in an effort to make accessible a vein of work that dates back, directly and indirectly, to a prescient vision Wilson developed in the early years of the Sony Walkman.