The Legacy of Robert Wilson

The Segal Center presented a conference exploring the work of renowned U.S. theatre director and visual artist, Robert Wilson, and its influence on contemporary visual and performing arts as well as future artistic production. In celebration of Wilson’s extraordinary career, we invited scholars, critics, and practitioners to contribute to a conference exploring the diverse aspects of his transformative vision and artistic practice. The conference took place between 5 and 8 August 2024 at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at the Graduate Center CUNY. The conference combined in-person and virtual talks, paper presentations, and panel discussions. 

Full Schedule

Monday 5 August

Welcome: Frank Hentschker, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at the Graduate Center CUNY; Markus Wessendorf, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa; Viola Kántor, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest
10:00 a.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)

Maria Shevtsova: “An Art of Senses and Emotions” 
11:00 a.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)

Wilson’s Postdramatic Stagings of Classical and Biographical Sources

Antal Bókay: “Robert Wilson’s Oedipus—the Postdramatic Journey of the Oedipus Story from Sophocles through Freud”
2:00 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)

John P. Bray: "They Asked Me to Draw a City: Stage Directions and New Imaginings in Robert Wilson’s Direction of Strindberg’s A Dream Play”
2:30 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)

Yoni Oppenheim: “Robert Wilson’s Production of Henrik Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken”
3:00 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)

Avraham Oz and Tal Itzhaki: “Time’s Shadows: Gendered and Ungendered Communities in Robert Wilson’s Conceptual Combat with Shakespeare’s Sonnets”
3:30 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)

Sacha Goldman: “Wilson’s Home in Art and on the Stage”
4:00 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)

Petra Egri: “A Postdramatic Theatre of Biography: The Life and Death of Marina Abramović ”
4:30 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)

Panel: Wilson’s Postdramatic Stagings of Classical and Biographical Sources
5:00 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)
Antal Bókay, Petra Egri, Avraham Oz, Tal Itzhaki, Sacha Goldman, Yoni Oppenheim, John P. Bray, moderated by Markus Wessendorf.

Robert Wilson in Conversation with Frank Hentschker
7:00 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)

Tuesday 6 August

Artaudian and Brechtian Aspects of Wilson’s Aesthetics

Markus Wessendorf: "Re-Viewing Stefan Brecht's Theatre of Visions from a (B.) Brechtian Perspective"
10:00 a.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)

Pia Kleber and Larry Ng: “The Dialectical Triad of Playwright, Director, and Berliner Ensemble Actors in Wilson’s Threepenny Opera”
10:30 a.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)

Keren Cohen: “Towards a Formalist Ritualistic Theatre: An Artaudian Reading of Robert Wilson’s Aesthetics”
11:00 a.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)

Dan Venning: “Transformation through Repetition: Robert Wilson’s Aesthetics and Einstein on the Beach in 2012”
11:30 a.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)

Dan Venning, Pia Kleber, Larry Ng, Keren Cohen, moderated by Markus Wessendorf: Panel: Artaud, Brecht, and Wilson; 
12:00 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)

Dramaturgy and Collaboration

Konrad Kuhn: “Thinking in Structures – Working as a Dramaturg with Robert Wilson” (online)
2:00 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)

Jonathan Kalb: "Wilson and Müller in Grumpy Berlin” (online)
2:30 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)

Nikolaus Müller-Schöll: “Listen to What Has Never Been Said. Fragments of Robert Wilson’s Theatrical Theory of Attention” (online)
3:00 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)

Hans-Werner Kroesinger: “Robert Wilson + Heiner Müller / On Dramaturgy”
3:30 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)

Anne Cattaneo, William Ivey Long, and Jennifer Rohn: “HamletMaschine in New York”
4:00 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)

Panel: Robert Wilson and Dramaturgy
5:00 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)
A hybrid panel discussion about Wilson’s collaboration with dramaturgs with Anne Cattaneo, Hans-Werner Kroesinger, Konrad Kuhn (online), and Ann-Christin Rommen, moderated by Frank Hentschker.

Wednesday 7 August

Gestural Art, Multisensorial Listening, and Diversity in Wilson’s Work

Katherine Mezur: “Etched Gesture: Robert Wilson’s Forever Dance” (TBC)
10:00 a.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)
No video archive available for this session.

Sophia Cocozza: “Listening to Deafman Glance”
10:30 a.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)

Jean Paul Bucchieri: “Watching from Outside > Working from Inside” 
11:00 a.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)

Hui Peng: “Performing Neurodiversity in the Collaborations of Robert Wilson and Christopher Knowles”
11:30 a.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)

Panel: Gestural Art, Multisensorial Listening, and Diversity in Wilson’s Work: Sophia Cocozza, Hui Peng, Ava Locks, Katherine Mezur, Jean Paul Bucchieri (online), moderated by Markus Wessendorf
12:00 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)

Costumes, Chairs, and Sites

Owen Laub: “Site, Space, Form: Robert Wilson’s Chairs on Stage”
2:00 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)

Stephanie Engeln, Carlos Soto, Owen Laub:: Panel: “Stage Design and Costume Design in Robert Wilson’s Work” 
2:30 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)

Wilson in Japan and Norway

Tadashi Uchino: “Robert Wilson and Japan” (online)
3:00 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)

Steve Earnest: “Robert Wilson and Norway”
3:30 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)

Clifford Allen: “The Robert Wilson Archive”
4:00 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)

Panel: The Legacy of Robert Wilson
4:30 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)
Marc Robinson (TBC, online), Maria Shevtsova (online), Bonnie Marranca (online), Tadashi Uchino (online), Markus Wessendorf, moderated by Frank Hentschker (online).

Thursday 8 August

Bonnie Marranca: Tree Lines (Reading)
2:00 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)
Followed by a conversation with Bonnie Marranca and Frank Hentschker

Marie de Testa: "The Watermill Center: A Theatrical Setting"
2:30 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)

Viola Kántor: “Going on a Journey: Immersive Installations and Museum Interventions in Robert Wilson Visual Art Practice”
3:00 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)

Noah Khoshbin: “The Watermill Collection”
3:30 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)

Clifford Allen: “The Robert Wilson Archive in Watermill”
4:00 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)

Conference Participants

Clifford Allen is a writer, archivist, scholar, historian, and concert presenter living in the Hudson Valley. From 2013 until the end of 2023, he was the lead archivist and director of archives for The Watermill Center.

Nixon Beltran was invited by Robert Wilson to participate in his International Summer Program in 2001. In 2006, he was asked to live at Watermill to help establish the Center’s programming as well as its gardens and grounds. He held the position of the Watermill Center Manager until 2021.

Antal Bókay is Professor Emeritus of Modern Literature and Literary Theory and co-founder and lecturer of the Psychoanalysis PhD Program at the University of Pécs, Hungary. His research interests include contemporary literary theory, American deconstruction, modern poetry, poetics, theatre theory, and the history and theory of psychoanalysis.

Jean Paul Bucchieri was born in Italy and has lived in Portugal since 1993. A director, researcher, and pedagogue, Jean Paul completed his PhD in 2011 at FMH, University of Lisbon. In 2007, he completed the Opera Directing Course at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. He is part of the Faculty of the Higher School of Theatre and Cinema. He is a researcher at CIAC. He participated in Robert Wilson's projects as an assistant and interpreter. As a director, he has regularly presented projects in the performing arts, theatre, and opera. In 2023, he completed a post-doctorate degree at the ULisboa Institute of Education with a focus on the relationship between staging, pedagogy, and research in art.

Anne Cattaneo is the dramaturg of Lincoln Center Theater and the creator and head of the Tony Award Honor nominated Lincoln Center Theater Directors’ Lab. A three-term past president of Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA), she is the recipient of its first Lessing Award for lifetime achievement of dramaturgy. She has worked widely as a dramaturg with directors such as Bartlett Sher, Robert Wilson, Adrian Hall, Jack O’Brien, Robert Falls, Mark Lamos, and JoAnne Akalaitis. As the director of the Playworks Program at the Phoenix Theater in the late 1970s, she commissioned and developed plays by Wendy Wasserstein, Mustapha Matura, and Christopher Durang. For the Acting Company, she created two projects: Orchards (Knopf and Broadway Play Publishing) that includes stage adaptations of seven Chekhov stories by Maria Irene Fornes, Spalding Gray, John Guare, David Mamet, Wendy Wasserstein, Michael Weller, and Samm-Art Williams, and Love's Fire (William Morrow) that features responses to Shakespeare sonnets by Eric Bogosian, William Finn, John Guare, Tony Kushner, Marsha Norman, Ntozake Shange, and Wendy Wasserstein. Her translations include Brecht’s Galileo (Goodman Theater 1986 starring Brian Dennehy) and Botho Strauss’ Big and Little (Phoenix production starring Barbara Barrie, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.) She is currently on the theatre history faculty at Juilliard. In July 2011, she was awarded the Margo Jones Medal. Her book The Art of Dramaturgy was published in September 2021 by Yale University Press. Anne is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow.

Sophia Cocozza is a PhD student in Music Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her cross-disciplinary research sits at the  intersections of sound, performance, and materiality with particular attention given to issues of gender and disability. Her research builds on museum studies and experience working in galleries and public art spheres.

Dr. Keren Cohen is a postdoctoral research fellow at Ben-Gurion University. Her research deals with questions of intermediality, interculturalism, ritual, gender, and the intersections between politics and art. Her PhD thesis, completed at the Hebrew University, focuses on Robert Wilson’s aesthetics. Her current research examines theatrical traces in Weimar cinema.

Mackenzie Davenport is a theatre director and video essayist. His directing credits include Caligula and The Bald Soprano (Nebraska Wesleyan University). His videos on his eponymous Youtube channel explore the styles of contemporary directors such as Katie Mitchell, Ivo Van Hove, and Robert Wilson.

Steve Earnest is Professor of Theatre at Coastal Carolina University in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina and was a Fulbright Scholar in Theatre at Nanjing Normal University in China from 2019 to 2020. Steve's publications include his monograph The State Acting Academy of East Berlin, (Mellen Press), a chapter in Performer Training (Harwood Press), and numerous articles and reviews in academic journals and periodicals. He holds a PhD in Theatre from the University of Colorado, Boulder and an MFA in Musical Theatre from the University of Miami, FL.

Petra Egri, PhD is an Assistant Professor and Head of the Department of Applied Arts at the University of Pécs. Her research interests include performing art, fashion theory and deconstruction. In 2023, her book on radical fashion performances was published by SZIF, Budapest, and won the Book of the Year Award.

Stephanie Engeln studied Interior Architecture and Design in Germany. In over 35 years of work in the field of visual arts, she has worked on a great variety of projects starting in theatre and opera, and subsequently moving into museum exhibitions; art installations; and object, furniture, and interior design, as well as event and graphic design. Meeting Robert Wilson on a theatre project in Germany in 1989 was a milestone in her career, eventually leading to many collaborations on Wilson’s projects over several decades. Stephanie Engeln’s design projects and collaborations include Mozart’s The Magic Flute and Der Messias, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and Turandot, Bartók and Schoenberg’s Bluebeard’s Castle & Erwartung; Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex, Debussy’s Pelléas et Melisande, Wagner’s Lohengrin and Parsifal, Glass and Wilson’s The White Raven, O’Keefe and Pinckney’s Orlando, Strauss’s The Egyptian Helena, Bellini’s Norma, Genet’s The Blacks, and Verdi’s La Traviata. She is proud to have been on Wilson’s team for projects such as The Giorgio Armani Show, which was exhibited in New York and Bilbao. She is currently working on Margery Arents Safir’s design of the upcoming book Robert Wilson: Then and Now.

Sacha Goldman is a Paris-based producer and filmmaker active in the field of arts and culture. A scholar of philosophy, he is a Co-founder and Secretary General of the Collegium International, a think tank network that has since 2002 been evolving into an ethical, geopolitical, and scientific organization.

Tal Itzhaki is the director of Alfa Theatre, Tel Aviv. She has designed over 250 shows in Israel and abroad. She created and headed the University of Haifa's Theatre Design program as well as taught at Tel Aviv University. Tal was a Visiting Artist at Columbia University. In addition to lecturing and conducting workshops worldwide, she has curated numerous design exhibitions, including 6 Israeli exhibitions at the Prague Quadrennial. She has also translated plays.

Jonathan Kalb is Professor of Theatre at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center, the Resident Dramaturg of Theatre for a New Audience, and the author of five books on theatre, including Beckett in Performance, The Theater of Heiner Müller, and Great Lengths: Seven Works of Marathon Theater. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Nation, Salon, and many other publications. He is a two-time winner of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, the country’s premier prize for theatre criticism. His TheaterMatters blog on current theatre may be found at www.jonathankalb.com.

Viola Kántor is an art historian, art critic, and audiovisual media professional based in Budapest, Hungary. In 2023, she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to conduct extensive research on her doctoral project concerning Robert Wilson's visual art at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and The Watermill Center, Long Island.

Noah Khoshbin is curator of the Watermill Center, RW Work Ltd. and director of the Estate of Paul Thek. Responsible for the Watermill Center’s collection of over 5,000 works of art, he has curated the collection in a variety of settings, including the Louvre Museum, Paris, and the Max Ernst Museum, Bruhl, Germany. Noah has curated numerous temporary exhibitions, installations, and performances, including artists Mike Kelley, Tania Bruguera, William Pope L, Christopher Knowles, Alvin Baltrop, Robert Nava, and Regina Galindo, to name only a few. Noah Khoshbin is a long time collaborator of Robert Wilson in Wilson’s work outside of the theatre.

Dr. Pia Kleber is Professor in the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies and the BMO Lab for Creative Research in the Arts, Performance, and AI at the University of Toronto. She has published extensively on Bertolt Brecht, feminism, Roger Planchon, Ariane Mnouchkine, Giorgio Strehler, Robert Wilson, and Robert Lepage.

Hans Werner Kroesinger, born in 1962, studied drama, theatre, and media at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Giessen. He worked as assistant director and dramaturg for Robert Wilson in New York and Berlin and was an artistic collaborator of Heiner Müller in Hamletmashine at Deutsches Theater in East Berlin in 1989. An award-winning director, he has since 1993 directed his own documentary theatre pieces at prestigious performance spaces, such as the Berliner Ensemble, the Volksbühne Berlin, the Staatstheater Stuttgart, the Bayerisches Staatsschauspiel München, Schauspiel Leipzig, and the Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin, among others. Since 2000, he has been developing performances together with the filmmaker and author Regine Dura. Their production Stolpersteine Staatstheater was showcased at the Theatertreffen Berlin in 2016 and at the Theatertreffen in Beijing in 2017. It has also successfully toured worldwide.

Konrad Kuhn studied in Berlin and worked as a dramaturg for drama and opera at theatres in Munich, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Berlin, Zurich, Vienna, Paris, Madrid, Bologna, São Paulo, Tallinn, and at the festivals in Salzburg and Bayreuth, among others. His collaboration with Robert Wilson started in 2010. He teaches at universities in Vienna and Frankfurt.

Owen Laub is an art historian and curator. He has been a frequent collaborator with Robert Wilson since 2013 and has produced numerous gallery and museum exhibitions of Wilson’s work. In 2022, he organized the exhibition Robert Wilson: Chairs, 1969–2011 at MDFG, New York. He is currently editing a publication on Wilson's use of chairs forthcoming later this year. He has served on the board of The Robert Wilson Arts Foundation since its establishment in 2016.

Ava Locks as the Inclusion Arts Coordinator at The Watermill Center has developed extensive programming that thoroughly used The Center’s rotating roster of international artists-in-residence, vast art collection, and existing ties with the community. These programs have increased opportunities for disabled and neurodivergent audiences, empowered high-school students to use art for social change, and engaged the community through new and creative avenues. They have also established new partnerships and provided artists with the tools to share their practices with the public in an engaging format.

William Ivey Long is an esteemed constume designer currently represented around the world by Chicago (now in its 28th year on Broadway) and Beetlejuice on tour, on the High Seas, and Down Under. In addition to his countless design credits for ballet, opera, film, television, and modern dance, Mr. Long has won six Tony Awards, with eighteen nominations. He was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame in 2005. www.williamiveylong.com

Bonnie Marranca is editor and publisher of PAJ Publications/PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. Her books include Timelines: writings and conversations, Performance Histories, Ecologies of Theatre, Theatrewritings, Conversations with Meredith Monk, and Alchemies of Theater: Plays, Performance Scores, Writings by Dick Higgins. Professor Emerita of Theatre, The New School, she has received a Fulbright Award and Guggenheim Fellowship.

Nikolaus Müller-Schöll is Professor of Theatre Studies at the Goethe University Frankfurt/M. His publications include: Das Theater des 'konstruktiven Defaitismus' (2002); Performing Politics (Co-ed. 2012); Theatre as Critique. (Co-ed. 2019); Das Denken der Bühne (Co-ed. 2019) Current research interests: script-based theatre, potentiality, theatre architecture as built ideology, end(s) of theory, and art in decolonization.

Larry Ng is a registered drama therapist and a certified Feldenkrais Method® practitioner. His theatre training includes both the Lecoq approach to physical theatre and Decroux’s Corporeal Mime. He holds a BA, 1st hon., and an MPhil in Philosophy, an MA in Drama Education, and an MA in Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies.

Yoni Oppenheim is a director, dramaturg, and translator who has collaborated with such artists as Doug Wright (Posterity), Hamish Linklater (Paris, ACTORS!), Dan Safer/Witness Relocation (Haggadah), Motti Lerner (At Night’s End), and Lola Arias (My Documents). Yoni is the Artistic Director of 24/6: A Jewish Theater Company.

Avraham Oz is Professor Emeritus at the University of Haifa. He has translated numerous plays and operas, chaired theatre departments at Tel Aviv University and University of Haifa, and taught home and abroad. Avraham has published books and articles; edited periodicals as well as TV and radio programs; was Associate Artistic Director at the Cameri Theatre; and directed productions by Shakespeare, Pinter, as well as his own plays.

Hui Peng (she/her) is a PhD Candidate in Theatre and Performance at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Hui’s research explores disability studies, audience studies, and dramaturgy. Her writings have been published in Theatre Journal, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, and The Journal of American Drama and Theatre. She serves as a committee member of the International Relaxed Performance Network (IRPN), focusing on advocating for neurodiversity through public-facing scholarship.

Jennifer Rohn, as an actor, recently received an Elliot Norton Award for outstanding actress in the play Dark Room and was nominated for her work in The Sound Inside. She has worked for director Robert Wilson in such monumental theatre pieces as The Civil Wars, Salome, and Hamletmachine and with Anne Bogart in Another Person Is a Foreign Country and Spring Awakening. She has appeared on Broadway in The Crucible and The Kentucky Cycle, and Off-Broadway in numerous productions at The Public Theater, BAM, and En Garde Arts, among other venues. She has worked widely in regional theaters across the United States and in Europe and has appeared in television and films. She has taught a range of acting approaches including Meisner, Stanislavski, Grotowski-based training, and Viewpoints at Boston Conservatory, St. Michael’s College, the Nevada Conservatory Theatre, the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, the Mint Theater Company, and elsewhere. BFA, New York University. Rohn has taught at Bennington since 2004.

Maria Shevtsova is Professor Emerita (Goldsmiths University of London) and Editor-in-Chief of New Theatre Quarterly. She is active in outreach activities across the world. Her acclaimed books, including Robert Wilson (2007; second, updated edition 2019) and Rediscovering Stanislavsky (2020), book chapters, and articles have been published in 15 languages.

Carlos Soto is a NYC-based designer and creative director.. Since 1997, he has collaborated with Robert Wilson, most recently Der Messias (Gran Teatre del Liceu). With Solange, the film and concert tour for When I Get Home, and In Past Pupils and Smiles at the 2019 Venice Biennial.

Marie de Testa is a set designer for theatre, performance, and the live arts. She holds a BArch from The Cooper Union, an MA in Scenography from the Norwegian Theatre Academy, and an MA in Design from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. She is currently pursuing a PhD in the History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University where she was awarded a Presidential Fellowship.

Tadashi Uchino received his PhD in Performance Studies from the University of Tokyo. He was a professor at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the University of Tokyo (1992–2017), and is currently a professor at the Department of Japanese Studies, Gakushuin Women’s College. His book Crucible Bodies was published in 2009. He is a contributing editor for TDR.

Dan Venning is an Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre & Dance at Union College in Schenectady, New York. His articles and reviews have appeared in numerous journals and edited collections. He holds a Ph.D. in Theatre from the CUNY Graduate Center.

Markus Wessendorf is the Chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in Honolulu. He is the President of the International Brecht Society and editor of the Brecht Yearbook. He has translated and directed plays and has worked as a dramaturg.