Why the slowness in Wilson’s shows?

Carla Bank does a good job of summarizing the three reasons usually given for slowness in Wilson. She writes:

Central to understanding this work are three formative influences:

Wilson had a speech impediment, which was cleared up at about age 17, when a theater instructor, Byrd Hoffman, told him he could speak if he slowed down. His active mind had been spewing out images faster than his tongue could control them. This translates in his work to his frequent devices of freezing real time and extending stage time, giving audiences spaces to think.

As a young adult, he worked as therapist with brain damaged children. He found that slow motion tasks awakened patients' sensitivity to immediate sensation.

The third major influence was the work and films of Dr. Dan Stern, an experimental psychiatrist that Wilson met through Jerome Robbins (who financed some early works). Stern showed Wilson his slow motion films, in which the infinitesimally minute body movements of infants and their mothers were revealed to be a highly complex, highly dramatic language. These films disclose a world of gestural communication that is not visible otherwise: a baby cries and the mother reaches to pick it up; what we see with our eyes is the large movement, the tender gesture--but when the films is shown in slow or stop motion, frame by frame, we can see that the mother's initial reaction, in almost every case is to make a lunge toward the child, and that the child's reaction is to recoil in what looks very much like terror. Wilson says "So many different things are going on, and the baby is picking them up. I'd like to deal with some of those things in the theater, if that is possible. I guess what I'm really interested in is communication.” (http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/carlanotes.html)

A longer description of the last example can be found in Stefan Brecht, The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978: 32. One of the things Wilson is supposed to have said regarding Stern’s films was that they show “the body doesn’t lie . . . we can trust the body.” Maybe that’s more true than false, but there’s still a lot of wishful thinking in that idea. Among other reasons that it might be criticized: Maybe the body doesn’t lie, but can we recognize its truth? See the funny exchange between Ossia Trilling and Wilson in the Brecht. Maybe Trilling is a “foolish and antagonistic (female?) interviewer,” as Brecht puts it. But maybe her resistance to Wilson’s story is interesting. Lacan said babies misrecognize themselves as holistic and unitary selves in the discrete little images of themselves they see in their mother’s eyes and in mirrors. But maybe babies don’t see that well. Maybe there’s a minor element of misrecognition in Lacan’s notion of misrecognition (yea, yea); more seriously, I’m not sure I buy Wilson’s interpretation of mother-child interactions in Stern’s films. I think he may be misrecognizing. Maybe a vestigial bit of misogyny exists in Wilson’s interpretation that the mother lunges violently at the child and that the child recoils in terror. What a story, what psychology! Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella, Snow White – you thought you experienced bad mother figures!

But babies don’t see that well. Is the baby experiencing terror because it subliminally recognizes the awful truth of the mom’s aggression in her seemingly tender gesture? Or is the baby just thrown for a loop because a blocky, somewhat undefined thing moves rapidly toward it?

Here are some other ideas about where slowness, stillness, and luminous silence come from in Wilson’s work:

Meredith Monk: “The idea of stillness was something that all of us were working on at the time – like sitting still for an hour in Blueprint with the audience just looking at a silent image. Many of us were working in very slow time. At a certain point I realized that movement as a structural continuity – real out-and-out choreography – was limiting what I could do, so I started dealing with images and music as my main concerns, and slow motion became the purest way of moving from one image to another” (from Lawrence Shyer, Robert Wilson and his Collaborators, New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1989: 296).

Richard Nelson: “I sat there with Bob one morning drinking coffee and he was particularly quiet. Eventually he said, ‘I’ve been watching this cow all morning and in two hours he hasn’t done more than move his head a little. That’s what I’m going to do’” (in Shyer 298).

Richard Foreman: “I think we were both influenced – as was everybody else – by Jack Smith. [. . .] Jack taught that new material was best found in those things that would be rejected by a professional take – any kind of awkwardness or amateurishness, any slow or boring rhythm, framed the right way, was the real subject matter for one’s art. Jack was in Bob’s early pieces [The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud, 1969]. I remember going to a rehearsal of Deafman Glance and waiting in the lobby to say ‘Hi’ afterwards. Bob came out and lamented, ‘Oh Jack, this is going terribly, what should I do?’ and Jack, who had a very funny voice, said, ‘Oh, just make it s-l-o-w-e-r, Bob, it should be s-l-o-w-e-r’” (in Shyer 301).

Susan Sontag: “Yet it is also interesting to note that this art form which is designed to stir the modern audience from its cozy emotional anesthesia operates with images of anesthetized persons, acting in a kind of slow-motion disjunction with each other, and gives us an image of action characterized above all by ceremoniousness and ineffectuality” (from “Happenings: An Art of Radical Juxtaposition,” 1962 in Against Interpretation, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966: 273).

Ehren Fordyce, 1/11/2005