ABSTRACT
I f Richard Foreman has been a SoHo theater artist whomostly stayed home, Robert Wilson has taken his esthetics around the world. When I first met him around 1965, he seemed a tall gangly guy who was somewhat inarticulate and easily distracted. Having graduated from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he did theatrical performances that are still remembered, Wilson soon afterward moved into a loft at 147 Spring Street (that had been previously occupied by the Open Theater, itself an artistic descendant of the Living Theatre). He lived there until it became an office for his foundation, moving first to the floor above and later into Tribeca. On Spring Street, as early as 1967, he began producing theatrical pieces that drew upon dance and spectacle without being either. One, entitled Byrdwoman, had three parts. The first involved two characters bouncing on boards in Wilson’s Spring Street loft. For the second part, Wilson rented trucks filled with hay and took the audience
around Manhattan. The third part took place outside in Jones Alley, a narrow L-shaped street that runs south of Bond Street and then east to Lafayette Street, in NoHo. “The strongest image, for me at least,” Wilson remembers, “was forty figures dressed in fur coats bouncing on boards in Jones Alley.” Another piece at the time, Theater Activity, was presented indoors at midnight in the Bleecker Street Cinema.
