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ROBERT WILSON

بوب ويلسون
鲍伯·威尔逊
בוב וילסון
ロバート·ウィルソン
밥 윌슨
Боб Уилсон
SHAKESPEAR`S SONETTES
Staging Shakespeare, not dramatic but lyrical: that was the intention of the American director Bob Wilson in Sonnets de Shakespeares (Sonnets de Shakespeare), a show on display at the Berliner Ensemble. To that end, Wilson is associated with American-Canadian composer and musician Rufus Wainwright. The result is a variety night, with reference to all genres of entertainment, from the commedia dell’arte to television sketches, passing through the cabaret. If in the Elizabethan era female roles were played by men, Bob Wilson did the same, creating this reverse practice: actresses play male roles. This inversion – Queen Elizabeth 1st, on her throne, declaiming a sonnet with a deep voice and Shakespeare himself, as a young man and an elder, in female voices – further intensifies the farcical tone of the show. So much so that even the sporadic number of transvestite actor Georgette Dee, microphone in hand, does not disagree much of the Shakespearean surroundings.

PHILIP GLASS

فيليب الزجاج
菲利普·格拉斯
פיליפ גלאס
フィリップ·グラス
필립 글래스
Филип Гласс
Einstein On The Beach

ROBERT WILSON
Portrait Trilogy:Einstein; Akhnaten; Gandhi

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Einstein on the Beach is an opera in four acts (framed and connected by five “knee plays” or intermezzos), scored by Philip Glass and directed by theatrical producer Robert Wilson. The opera eschews traditional narrative in favor of a formalist approach based on structured spaces laid out by Wilson in a series of storyboards. The music was written “in the spring, summer and fall of 1975.”Glass recounts the collaborative process: “I put [Wilson’s notebook of sketches] on the piano and composed each section like a portrait of the drawing before me. The score was begun in the spring of 1975 and completed by the following November, and those drawings were before me all the time.”
full opera

BREAKFAST

Empire State
Empire State is a kinetic A.I. artwork visualizing the current time-of-day and weather at the Empire State Building in New York. The imagery was created from running a sketch through an Artificial Intelligence model to generate two variations on the image, each printed on each side of the discs. The piece visualizes the current time-of-day and weather by animating clouds, rain, light/shadow, by rotating sections of discs to the reverse side. When one walks up to the piece, they will see their image reflected back at them, further embedding them to the connection between where they are and the current state in NYC.

Frederick Kiesler

Kiesler’s longest-running project was Endless House, a single-family dwelling whose biomorphic form and lack of corners strongly contrasted with the hard geometric edges that defined most modern architecture of the time. He sought to design a structure responsive to the occupants’ functional and spiritual requirements. He developed his ideas for the house over several decades, creating numerous sketches and models. Although plans were made to build a to-scale model in MoMA’s Sculpture Garden in 1958, they did not materialize, and the project remains unrealized. Nonetheless, Kiesler’s Endless House concept was highly influential and stands as a strong expression of his bold statement: “Form does not follow function. Function follows vision. Vision follows reality.”

video

FIONA TAN

פיונה טאן
フィオナ·タン
Фиона Тан
فيونا تان
Rise and Fall
Fiona Tan explores storytelling, memory, and the part they play in the formation of identity throughout this exhibition of five video installations, various associated sketches and one single-channel video. Rise and Fall (2009), elongated projections onto two large, side-by-side screens, is a wordless meditation, set to music, of a woman no longer young but still conscious of her looks; she was clearly a beauty in her youth. As the video proceeds we gather that the young woman pictured on the second screen is the memory of her younger self. They often move through domestic activities (sleeping, bathing, dressing) in parallel; this is inter-cut with scenes of violently rushing water (shot at Niagra Falls, it turns out). It’s a hackneyed metaphor – the water’s endless surging as an image of time’s relentless uni-directionality – but in Tan’s hands that doesn’t seem to matter; she creates extraordinarily emotional work out of simple stories and well-worn themes.