Robert Wilson takes a walk with angels in Norfolk
Best known for Einstein on the Beach, director Robert Wilson has brought his latest work to the Norfolk coast: an otherworldly pilgrimage through the dunes
Patrick Barkham
@patrick_barkham
Wed 22 Aug 2012 13.00 EDT First published on Wed 22 Aug 2012 13.00 EDT
Postive Cone which sits in the Norfolk sand dunes, part of Robert Wilson's Walking. Click on image to enlarge. Photograph: Si Barber
"Don't be afraid to go too slowly," whispers a figure in a yellow poncho, treading deliberately by my side until I move at the correct speed. Ahead of me, under a vast sky, I can see eight other people, evenly spaced, pacing like slow-motion zombies across the fields.
This strange universe is called Walking, and it has been created by the director and artist Robert Wilson, in collaboration with the Dutch artists Theun Mosk and Boukje Schweigman. Part meditation, part immersive theatre, it is a three-hour walk in which participants are instructed to move slowly across a remote slice of Norfolk countryside, their encounters with a series of dramatic sound installations timed to the second by yellow-cloaked guides called "angels".
Wilson has touched down fleetingly at a pub in Norfolk, en route from New York to Ireland, to talk about Walking – although I am not anticipating much of an explanation. Previous interviews note his tendency to avoid eye contact, and to sketch explanations on paper rather than verbalise them; he is given to gnomic paradoxes such as: "You think, 'What is the wrong thing to do?' and then do that." Now 70, Wilson is perhaps best known for Einstein on the Beach, his five-hour, interval-free collaboration with composer Philip Glass that made both men famous in 1976. His experimental pieces are notoriously uncompromising: Deafman Glance was a seven-hour, silent opera inspired by the deaf-mute child Wilson adopted in 1967 when he was 27.
Dressed more like a banker than an artist, Wilson is tall and intimidating, and spends 20 minutes describing Walking with pencil on pad. But he is also surprisingly jolly and generous. The piece, he explains, was first created for a Dutch festival but has been reimagined for the north Norfolk coast. These fields, woods, water meadows and sand dunes perfectly match Wilson's desire to create an immersive experience undisturbed by the built environment – apart from his own constructions. "I wanted nature, the landscape, to predominate," he says.
Norfolk reminds Wilson of his own childhood in Waco, Texas: "I always thought of the English landscape as being English gardens. Here, it's so beautiful to see nature in the raw," he says. Given the miserable-sounding upbringing he endured, it is surprising he acknowledges any creative debt to the state: the gay son of a father who viewed his sexuality as an illness to be cured, Wilson had a speech impediment and was incarcerated after a suicide attempt. But "the landscape of Texas is in all my work," he says. "It's that light, it's that sky."
Slowness is another motif Wilson returns to, with Walking's snail's pace sternly enforced by the angels. "You walk at a much slower pace than you normally would, so your perceptions are different. If we listen ..." He pauses for a long 20 seconds, during which there is the sound of a child's wail and a clink of cutlery. "That sequence of sounds will never happen again. Never. The only thing that's constant is change." In a woodland glade, walkers recuperate to ethereal choral music. This turns out to be a recording of crickets slowed down by Tom Waits, an approximation of what they might sound like if they lived as long as humans. "What you hear is like human voices, or choirs from heaven," Wilson says.
This is the latest of many collaborations with Waits. Wilson – a great polymath – has worked with everyone from Marina Abramovic to Allen Ginsberg, William S Burroughs to Lou Reed. Wilson met Samuel Beckett several times and although they never worked together, he is heading to Enniskillen this week to perform Krapp's Last Tape, which Beckett wrote for a 70-year-old man. He is also planning a production of Peter Pan with CocoRosie, the half-Cherokee folk singing sisters. He adds: "I want to work with Jay-Z. I went to see him the other day. But CocoRosie, they are great." The sisters recently stayed with him at the Watermill, the arts centre he founded on Long Island 20 years ago, and which he considers home. What would he do with Jay-Z? "Oh, I don't know," he says. This particular collaboration is definitely not up for discussion.
Critics and participants will search for meaning in Walking, and in a moment of weakness Wilson likens it to a human being. The first installation, which requires walkers to stand in a circle around a bottomless conical shape with an amplified groan playing around them, is heavy, like feet; the walking part is the body; and the final installation, a futuristic mud cone, is the mysterious temple of the mind.
Mostly, however, Wilson does not like his art to have explicit meanings. "If I see a sunset, it doesn't have to tell me a story, it's something I experience, and that's what's most important here. Susan Sontag said to experience something is a way of thinking. We don't have to imply meaning. This piece is about experiencing."
Britain and the US, he thinks, are too set on the idea of storytelling in theatre. "I go to one Broadway show every year and they are all the same, whether it's Angels in America or Death of a Salesman. I started looking at my watch during Peter Pan. It's never, never, longer than 25 seconds that the audience doesn't have to react. 'Do you understand what I'm saying? Do you get it?' And after a while you don't get anything! It's OK to get lost!" he hollers.
The prophet not being recognised by his own is a recurring theme for Wilson, whose abstract works have been rapturously received in continental Europe, less so in the US. His father, he says, never understood him. "Poor man. The first time he saw my work, he said, 'Son, not only is this sick, it's abnormal.'" (Wilson adopts a thick Texan drawl.) When he lost $250,000 staging Einstein on the Beach at the Metropolitan opera in New York, his father told him, "'I didn't think you were smart enough to be able to lose $250,000.' I said, 'Dad, it wasn't easy, it was a lot of work.'"
Since 1999, Wilson has premiered nine theatrical works in Berlin; his last commission in the US was 21 years ago. "My tax dollar, which goes to New York State Council on the Arts, is by and large only spent to fund people from the state of New York! And you want to be the cultural capital of the world?" he says. "New York is very provincial. They're very cut-off, they don't have an awareness of so much that is going on in the world."
Wilson can rage like an artist who never got his due; but he can also laugh at his commercial failures. On the third night of his 12-hour performance piece The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, which premiered in Copenhagen in 1973, the 128-strong cast realised that by 2am there was no one left in the audience. Even Wilson's idea of putting spare cast members into the empty seats couldn't prevent it from closing that same night. When his A Letter for Queen Victoria was shown on Broadway in 1975, a "little blue-haired lady from New Jersey" walked out after half an hour, telling the usher: "Honey, I know it's a turkey, but what does it mean?" When Wilson repeated the story to his sister, she said: "I don't know how you get away with all of that." "Well, sometimes you don't," he says, with the glee of a man who has got away with plenty.