The career of Robert Wilson, the visionary performance artist, designer – of furniture, stage sets, costumes – and director, was surely the last hurrah for the heavily subsidised and sponsored American and European avant-garde theatre of the 1970s.
Wilson’s financially expensive, physically expansive, beautifully lit and choreographed work – lots of sculptural silhouettes, time-stretching slow motion, and haunting soundscape – was first seen in Britain at the Royal Court in 1978. This show was I Was Sitting on My Patio This Guy Appeared I Thought I Was Hallucinating. Wilson and the choreographer Lucinda Childs appeared in a Hockneyesque stage picture, unlike anything previously seen in Sloane Square, the home of new British playwriting: a minimalist, austere design of a telephone, a telephone wire and a gauze over the front of the stage with projected images on it.
