“Small minute hand movements comprise most of the action,” wrote Robert Wilson to a friend as he prepared the first production of Einstein on the Beach.
Marc Robinson traces the many variations and meanings of those gestures in a talk that ranges from the opera’s 1976 premiere to its recent 2012 re-staging. He also draws on his research in the “Einstein” archives at the Columbia University Library and the Byrd Hoffman Water Mill Foundation (which operates The Watermill Center) to explore Wilson’s allusions to (and sometimes explicit quotations of) other works of art and artifacts of mass culture—the director’s theatricalization of his own research. Professor Robinson will be joined by Helga Davis who is currently performing in the world tour of Einstein on the Beach.
Reception to follow.
ABOUT MARC ROBINSON
Marc Robinson is Professor of Theater Studies, English, and American Studies at Yale University and Professor Adjunct of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at the Yale School of Drama. He is also Chair of the Yale College Theater Studies program. His books include The American Play: 1787-2000 (Yale Univ. Press, 2009; rpt. 2010) and The Other American Drama (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994; rpt. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1997). In addition, he is the editor of three books: The Myopia and Other Plays by David Greenspan (Critical Performances series, Univ. of Michigan Press, 2012), The Theater of Maria Irene Fornes (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1999), and Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile (Faber and Faber, 1994; rpt. Harcourt Brace, 1996). His essays and reviews have appeared in The Drama Review, Theater, Performing Arts Journal,Modern Drama, The Yale Review, American Theatre, The Village Voice, The New Republic, and The New York Times, among other publications. For his work, he has been awarded the 2009 George Jean Nathan Award and the 2010 George Freedley Special Jury Prize (both for The American Play), the 1999 ATHE Outstanding Essay Prize, and the 2004 Betty Jean Jones Award for Outstanding Teaching of American Drama. He holds a D.F.A. in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism from the Yale School of Drama (1992).
ABOUT HELGA DAVIS
Helga Davis (pictured above, on the left) is a principle actor in the 25th anniversary re-staging of Robert Wilson and Philip Glass’ seminal work Einstein on the Beach. In 2012, Ms. Davis appeared twice in the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, in both Einstein on the Beach and Maya Beiser’s Elsewhere with music by Missy Mazzoil. She will have her second appearance at the Barbican in 2012 when she returns in May to star in an opera written for her by Paola Prestini, Oceanic Verses, with libretto by Donna DiNovelli and video by Ali Houssani (Voom Portraits, Robert Wilson). After London, Ms. Davis will travel in the summer of 2013 to Antwerp and Hamburg to work on a new opera by Shara Worden (My Brightest Diamond) with libretto by Andrew Ondrejcak.
Ms. Davis’ past work has included The Blue Planet (2008), a multi-media theater piece written by Peter Greenaway and directed by Saskia Boddeke, and was co-star in The Temptation of St. Anthony directed by Robert Wilson, with libretto and score by Bernice Johnson Reagon of Sweet Honey in the Rock. In February 2008 Davis conducted a special feature interview with artist Kara Walker for the WNYC program Morning Edition on the eve of Ms. Walker’s Whitney Museum retrospective. David Keenan, of Wire Magazine, describes Ms. Davis as “a powerful vocalist with an almost operatic range and all the bruised sensuality of Jeanne Lee.”
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