A firm hand on the throttle

By Mark Swed

April 30, 2006 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

New York — HAVE you heard the one about Bob and the grizzly bear?

Some years ago, Robert Wilson, renowned for his visionary theater of stunning slow motion and indelibly memorable light, spent 3 1/2 months in the Glacier Mountains of British Columbia, alone in a cabin in winter when there were only a few hours of light a day. As he recalled earlier this month in a dressing room at the Metropolitan Opera -- where he was rehearsing a revival of his production of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” -- one evening while in bed, he heard a noise.

“I took a torch and I shined it on this grizzly bear’s face, and he stopped,” Wilson said. A lanky Texan who at 64 has filled out -- and become one of the world’s most celebrated artists -- he suddenly leaped up and just as suddenly froze, seizing my gaze.

“We looked at each other, and after about 15 minutes my arm started aching. I was pretty tense, and he was pretty tense too. I was just looking at him, and he was just looking at me.

“Half an hour passed, and I really had to breathe, but I kept this light on his face. What do I do? Almost an hour passed, and we’re just looking at each other. A little more time passes, and he turned around and walked away.

“Klee said a good actor’s like a bear,” Wilson declared, breaking the tension with a crafty laugh. “You can always wait them out. An actor can have that power in stillness. Ezra Pound said the fourth dimension is stillness and the power over wild beasts.”

Did painter Paul Klee and poet Ezra Pound really say those things? It doesn’t matter. One thing I learned on a whirlwind trip trying to catch up with some of Wilson’s most ambitious recent work is that stillness and continual movement are not in opposition.

In Paris, I attended three of the four operas in Wilson’s production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle, which were staged at the Theatre du Chatelet with minimal sets, a few exquisitely designed props and a mesmerizing backdrop of warm, rich, changing light that took the breath away. Wagner’s music was not so much illustrated as pointed out.

In New York, I saw his recent production of “Peer Gynt,” which the Brooklyn Academy of Music had imported from Norway. Here the staging was wackier -- to capture the fanciful nature of Ibsen’s epic -- the lighting cooler, more Northern. But again, the larger effect was of a meditation on Ibsen’s message, which is also Wilson’s message: To know yourself, you need to get down to the essentials. For all his contrary motion, for all his seeming contrasting a text with formal, peculiar stylization, Wilson’s is a theater of clarity. Nearly impossible-to-achieve clarity.

Seeing so much in six days meant that I saw a lot of it jet-lagged. But that wasn’t necessarily a problem. Being disoriented in time and space isn’t bad preparation for the Wilsonian stage, an alternative universe all aglow.

After all, rushing, rushing, rushing to create immobility in far-flung places is exactly what Wilson does all the time. The director had dashed to New York after preparing the massive Paris “Ring.” In three days, he managed to fit the four-hour “Peer Gynt,” with the Norwegian troupe that had done it last year in Oslo and Bergen, onto the BAM stage.

The next morning, Wilson had to change gears for Wagner; the Met production was to open in less than a week. Then, he was off to Los Angeles to prepare “The Black Rider,” his 1990 version of Carl Maria von Weber’s German Romantic opera “Der Freischutz” -- turned into black cabaret, with music by Tom Waits. It opened at the Ahmanson on Wednesday.

Backstage at the Met, Wilson was tired. He was also frustrated, as usual when he works in opera. Rehearsals are so expensive that nothing can be worked through properly. The “Lohengrin” chorus wasn’t in sync with his vision.

“I can’t get them to do it,” he complained. “This music of Wagner is getting louder and louder and quicker and quicker, and these 130 people should be like a wall moving toward the audience, against the music. Of course, they want to walk on the beat, like a high school marching band.

“I’ll never get it with this chorus. They don’t have the vocabulary. And I don’t have the time. It’s not a lack of will. It’s just that this is something that has never been considered in our Western training.”

Yet he never stops trying. Indeed, the only time Wilson seems to stop is when he walks onto a stage. April has been a typical month, with major Wilson work in three continents and on both coasts of America. In Shanghai, the exhibition of Armani clothes that he created in 2000 for New York’s Guggenheim Museum is currently on display.

But nowhere has Wilson had to try harder than Los Angeles, which to his amazement -- and pretty much to Los Angeles’ amazement -- has become the American city most receptive to him. “Black Rider” is the third Wilson show at the Music Center this season, Los Angles Opera having already presented his productions of “Parsifal” and “Madame Butterfly.” A few blocks away at the Japanese American National Museum you can look at the sculpture of Isamu Noguchi, as seen through the eyes of Wilson, in a show he designed that will run through May 14.

Nowhere to go but up

FOR two decades, Wilson’s relationship with Los Angeles was miserable. The centerpiece of the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival was to have been a multinational opera, “the CIVIL warS,” with segments to be produced around the world and put together over seven hours in the Shrine Auditorium. The composers enlisted included Philip Glass, Gavin Bryars and David Byrne. Jessye Norman, Hildegard Behrens and David Bowie had signed on. Many of the segments were staged elsewhere. But L.A. couldn’t, or wouldn’t, raise the funds, and the full show was never mounted.

What’s more, though several attempts have been made to come up with the $1 million or more needed, L.A. has never managed to import the iconic “Einstein on the Beach.” This 1976, five-hour Wilson and Glass opera, with no narrative and no libretto but with enticingly repetitive “unoperatic” music and dazzling imagery, made American operatic and theatrical history.

Then there was the “Monsters of Grace” fiasco. For its 1998 season, UCLA had hoped to commission a spectacular new work from Wilson and Glass. But cost-cutting measures for a show that might easily have toured turned it into a 3-D animated film whose special effects were entrusted to a firm unable to realize Wilson’s vision. He was so unhappy he refused to appear for the premiere.

So why L.A., and why now?

Wilson simply laughed.

“I don’t know how that happened. The Chinese say, ‘Don’t run after your horse and it will come back of its own accord.’ I always thought L.A. would be the last place on Earth where my work would be seen.”

In fact, Los Angeles has cast a curious shadow over Wilson’s development for a quarter of a century, and that shadow can be traced through the ironies associated with his L.A. Opera breakthrough.

In 2004, exactly 20 years after the “CIVIL warS” debacle, the company gave L.A. its first full-scale Wilson production with “Madame Butterfly.” And the first irony is that that the cancellation of “CIVIL warS” meant that the operatic event of the Olympic Arts Festival turned out to be an engagement by England’s Royal Opera. Those performances inspired the Music Center to finally found its own opera company.

A second irony is that for the segment of “CIVIL warS” that Wilson workshopped in Tokyo, he met Japanese choreographer Suzushi Hanayagi. Although he had already developed his stylized movements and his slow walks, she helped him create a more specific formal vocabulary of movement based on the principles of Kabuki and Noh theater.

It was three years later at La Scala in Milan that Wilson first applied the Kabuki principle of hanamichi to traditional opera. The term means “flower path,” and it refers to a walkway for the actors that links the back of the theater to the stage. Wilson, faced with the famed soprano Montserrat Caballe, whose exquisitely floated pianissimos came from a short, squat middle-aged body, decided to simply exile all the singers to a platform, use a hanamichi stage for actors who mimed the action and set up a third area where a host of jailbait femmes fatales portrayed Richard Strauss’ Salome.

The young conductor in the pit was Kent Nagano. And it was Nagano who, as music director of L.A. Opera, was responsible for persuading the company to mount the storied, Kabukied “Butterfly” that Wilson created for the Paris Opera in 1993 and for which Hanayagi created many of the original movements.

“In Japan,” Wilson explained at the Met, “if you are going to be a classical actor, you start at age 2. And the first thing you do is learn how to stand on the stage. In the Noh theater, they believe the gods are beneath the floor. You stand. Then you learn to walk. There are hundreds of ways of walking, but you have to learn them.

“Now, one of the singers here today, he was thinking with his mind. ‘Think with your body,’ I told him.

“The big problem is that the singers don’t have this kind of training. Most of the theater they do is naturalistic and psychological. But my work is formal. Most of the singing in opera is still in the 19th century, an outward portraying of emotions, and it looks to me grotesque.”

Of course, to many, Wilson’s own theater all but defines the grotesque. Indeed, “Black Rider” is a tongue-in-cheek attempt to make a supernatural 19th century German opera much more grotesque than anything Weber could have imagined. But there is a huge difference between what is unintentionally grotesque, what is self-consciously grotesque and what transcends the grotesque altogether.

With all deliberation

ALL three were on display in the three parts of Wilson’s “Ring” -- “Das Rheingold,” “Die Walkure” and “Gotterdammerung” -- that I saw in Paris. The productions, which originated at the Zurich Opera, were presented by the Chatelet and the Orchestre de Paris, conducted with firm purpose by Christoph Eschenbach. Tickets were scarce. The audiences were rapt.

At their best, particularly the opening of “Rheingold” and the last act of “Gotterdammerung” -- the representation of the primordial, foggy, luminescent Rhine and the downfall of the world -- the productions were undiluted magic. Two scenes that stood out in “Gotterdammerung” were the popular instrumental interludes, Siegfried’s Rhine journey and his death. In both cases, the hero (elegantly portrayed and sung by Nikolai Schukoff) walked in classic Wilson slow motion across the stage while the backdrop went through elaborate color changes broken up by a fuzzy horizontal white line. The sounds of the French orchestra also highlighted color and seemed to fill all the senses.

“My problem with singers in general or stage direction in opera in general is that it’s too busy,” Wilson said when I brought up these moments. “If I really want to concentrate on music, I close my eyes, and then I hear better. But can I create something onstage that can help me hear the music better?”

In such formal work, expression comes, Wilson maintains, through stillness. “Now, I can’t tell you how to do that,” he continued. “But if something is deeply felt, that will be your expression and you don’t have to outwardly portray it. So then I try often to reduce the staging so that I can hear the music.

“It’s much more difficult to stand and to keep it alive than to move all around. Finding the right place of mind, it’s the way to breathe, the way to keep tension, the way to keep it dangerous.”

Yet not everyone in this “Ring” got it, or even came close.

Endrik Wottrich, the Siegmund, who replaced the originally scheduled Placido Domingo, was sloppy. A frazzled Sieglinde (Petra-Maria Schnitzer) and a limp Wotan (Jukka Rasilainen) further lowered the intensity level. As Brunnhilde, Linda Watson at least had resilience and stamina in her favor.

But the singer who most impressed was Mihoko Fujimura, a frighteningly stern Fricka, Wotan’s wife. To watch her, severe and focused in every movement and pose, to hear her attack Wotan with precision of pitch and attention to every syllable, was to witness what happens when a singer achieves what Wilson asks for. She moved less than anyone else onstage, and yet I have never seen an angrier, more convincing Fricka.

As Fujimura demonstrated, the only way to perform Wilson is to embrace a total vision. The usual complaint, and one that surfaced once more in the New York press after his “Peer Gynt,” was that his stylized productions constrict an author’s or composer’s work into the director’s own hallucinations. But Wilson is not a director as much as a theater artist. The subsuming vision is the point, just as was, say, Gustav Klimt’s when he turned Salome into a glittery Klimt.

The other complaint about Wilson is that he makes everything look the same. But “Peer Gynt” seemed vastly different than his “Ring.” A winning, lighthearted musical score by Michael Galasso, actors who could turn on a dime, Wilson’s ability to juggle the antic and the reflective, the brilliant icy light, the grandly fashioned settings and their sheer strangeness all made this into a kind of anti-Wagnerian miracle play.

Still, it is worth noting that both the “Ring” and “Peer Gynt” are works significantly more refined than the major Wilson pieces mounted this season at the Music Center, all of which originated in the early ‘90s.

Thus, Los Angeles’ next slow, stylized, precise Wilson step must be to catch up, and Wilson says that it will. Although Nagano is moving on after this season and Domingo’s Wilson moment has clearly passed (at the Music Center, he looked culture-shocked as Parsifal), L.A. Opera remains the one company in America committed to Wilson’s work. Planned are an “Aida” created for Brussels four years ago, a new “Turandot” and an undefined Cuban project.

After that, who knows?

“A good lesson is to think, ‘What should I not do next?’ ” he said. “You should do what you should not do.”

Swed is The Times’ classical music critic.