ABSTRACT
The revolutionary 1960s, though largely forgotten, embraced utopian energies that
could be sometimes felt in the theater and manifested itself in audio-visual spaces that had not been heard before, and could not be perceived in existing terms of theater, opera, and dance. Looking at the undersides, or other sides, of Robert Wilson’s early operas, and especially their presumed formalist poetic architectures and “dislocations” of the corporeal, this essay probes the aesthetic politics of Wilson’s stagecraft to re-imagine the perceptional context of the operas and their reception at the time and political era of Einstein on the Beach’s first production. A critical reflection on the re-performances of Einstein will conclude the chapter, probing its production model and use of dispositif in the context of contemporary process-oriented modes of composed theater.
