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This book aims to bring about an understanding of how the concepts of “voice” and “genre” function in texts, especially religious texts. To this end, it joins literary theorists in the discussion about “narrative.” The book rejects the idea of genre as a fixed historical form that serves as a template for readers and writers; instead, it suggests that we imagine different genres, whether narrative, lyric, or dramatic, as the expression of different voices. Each voice, the book asserts, possesses different key qualities: embodiment, sociality, contextuality, and opacity in the dramatic voice; intimacy, limitation, urgency in lyric; and a “magisterial” quality of comprehensiveness and cohesiveness in narrative. These voices are models for our selves, composing an unruly and unstable multiplicity of selves. The book applies its theory of “voice” and “genre” to five texts: Dineson's Out of Africa, Donne's Holy Sonnets, Primo Levi's The Periodic Table, Robert Wilson's Einstein on the Beach, and Coleridge's Biographia Literaria. Through these literary works, the book discerns the detailed ways in which a text constructs a voice and, in the process, a self. More importantly, this book demonstrates that this process is a religious one, fulfilling the function that religions traditionally assume: that of defining the self and its world.

In 2010, La Galigo, a Bugis mythological epic describing the founding of the human world, was included in UNESCO's Memory of the World register. This accolade again brought La Galigo into the international spotlight, as had occurred when Robert Wilson's stage play I La Galigo, based on this epic, debuted in Singapore in 2004. Wilson's production received acclaim and critique, with reviews primarily focusing on his ability to achieve an authentic representation of Bugis identity and their past. These responses raise questions around the presupposition that there is an authentic Bugis identity and past that can be publicly recreated. This article analyses the concept of authenticity through reviews of Wilson's production and the work of key theorists to show that for many people, authenticity is achievable and of critical importance in underpinning any sense of a unified and singular ethnic identity, while for others, identity is always already a mix of different global influences and as such is either irrelevant, or liberated from a sense of a singular heritage.

In the history of portraying Jews on the early modern stage, critics frequently cite Robert Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London as an anomaly. The play’s first modern editor, H.S.D. Mithal, went so far as to describe Gerontus as ‘a character sui generis’, quite unlike Marlowe’s porridge-poisoning Machiavel, Shakespeare’s knife-whetting usurer, and the devilish doctor in Selimus. This essay explores the questions raised by Wilson’s portrayal of Gerontus, paying particular attention to their critical and theatrical implications. What was understood by the term ‘Jew’ and how might Elizabethan audiences have recognized Gerontus as a Jew? Is the play really an anomaly of early modern theatre history?

O artista Robert Wilson é uma importante figura para o teatro contemporâneo, pois seus espetáculos teatrais são compostos de uma virtuosa visualidade, que se constitue em metáforas e signos que precisam ser decodificados pelo espectador de acordo com sua observação perante a obra. Com base em sua trajetória artística e pessoal é que percebemos a construção da identidade cênica e a maneira que são concebidas suas obras. Uma das formas de enunciação poética do artista acontece através da liberdade dada ao fruidor para experimentá-la, fazendo com que seus espetáculos sejam um conjunto de espectros de paisagens a serem elucidadas pelo próprio observador. Devido a isso, para adentrarmos em questões ontológicas evocadas pela visualidade do artista, é necessário que contextualizemos alguns relatos de sua trajetória pessoal. Essa foi uma das principais instâncias que fizeram com que questões conceituais fossem exploradas cenicamente por esse diretor teatral ao longo dos anos. Portanto, para que afunilemos este estudo, iremos visualizar os caminhos da narrativa do personagem bíblico Adão, no espetáculo Adam’s Passion. Ademais, nossos materiais metodológicos para esta investigação se imbricam nos pensamentos de ontologia da arte, concatenados por Currie (1989), e pela abordagem da análise de espetáculos de Belém (2014).

Yet, the text's tendency to draw the reader's attention to the hermeneutic leaps needed to fill in these gaps also flags that a certain wariness of this narrative seduction is expected. [...]while a high degree of narrative literacy is expected in the form of a capacity to finish these half-formed narratives, the text also trains the reader in being narratively literate in the sense of being capable of refraining from taking one's interpretation of the narration for granted. A critical narrative literacy (see Romero-Ivanova et al.) encompasses \"an understanding of how stories function, and their effects at individual and collective levels\" (Dillon and Craig 81)-a \"narrative awareness\" (Meretoja 93) enabling reflection on \"the kinds of narratives we use in making sense of our lives,\" and on how \"each narrative is told from a certain perspective and involves interpretation, selectivity, and meaning-giving\" (Kinnunen et al.). Since such reflexiveness is an intrinsic possibility of narrative (Walsh 189), this critical dimension may also be seen as the full potential of narrative literacy. To narrate is to perceive a semiotics of action in what we do and what happens to us (mimesis 1), and to establish relations of cause and effect between such events (mimesis2), in order to reflect on their value and meaning (mimesis3) (55-64). [...]narrative literacy can be defined as: (1) the ability to recognize possible narratives in our experience-but also an awareness that we perceive narrative, rather than that it is actually there; (2) the ability to emplot-but also an awareness that the resulting plot is only one of many possibilities; and (3) the ability to interpret narratives-but also: to engage in metahermeneutics, i.e. reflect on how we interpret (Korthals Altes). [...]undernarrated may refer to a lack of detail at the level of narration, especially when it is signaled that those details could have been narrated.

The tendency to reduce the movements of performers in media art to data results in a flattening of identities and makes the performers’ essence seemingly insignificant. Two case studies showcase what might be lost through datafication, even as they resist it: Lucinda Childs “walking” in Bach 6 Solo by Robert Wilson, and Michael Jackson standing still at the start of his 1993 Super Bowl Halftime show. The desire to detach the body from aesthetic significance can be traced back to America’s historical racism.

The literary work I La Galigo is an ancient book in the form of poetry that contains the myth of the creation of the Buginese civilization which was crowned by UNESCO as World Memory. Literary reading of I La Galigo is done while singing Laoang or Selleang songs. In fact, its existence is increasingly disappearing in the life of the Buginese Society today. I La Galigo then returned and attracted international attention after director Robert Wilson presented it in the form of a play written by Rhoda Grauer. By presenting a story about the process of the formation of the world as well as the long and spiritual journey of Sawerigading, the theater I La Galigo directed by Robert Wilson is considered capable of giving a stronger impression to the audience. This paper aims to 1) explore the theater of I La Galigo by Robert Wilson from the study of Linguistics, and 2) reveal the change of literary works of I La Galigo into theater performances and the process of transferring written literary works called I La Galigo into script theater performances. This study uses a qualitative method with data obtained from the literature study. It focuses on looking at the adaptation in the literary work of I La Galigo into a theatrical performance and the process of changing a written literary work, namely I La Galigo into a script for a theatrical performance by using dramaturgy theory and discourse transfer method.

World-renowned for having made a totally new kind of theatre, director-designer Robert Wilson first astonished international audiences in Paris in 1971 with Le Regard du sourd (Deafman Glance) and then with his twenty-four-hour Ouverture at the first edition of the Festival d’Automne in 1972. He also refers in this Conversation to Einstein on the Beach, premiered at the Avignon Festival in 1976, as another example among more of France offering him a home before he eventually founded the Watermill Center in 1992 on Long Island in the State of New York. Watermill, a laboratory for multidisciplinary creativity, opened its doors to the public in 2006 and is a focal point of the Conversation as a whole. Wilson’s immediately pre-Covid-pandemic production of The Messiah by Mozart was premiered at the Mozartwoche Salzburg in February 2020 and performed subsequently in Paris during a brief Covid ‘lull’ in September of that year. Discussion of this pivotal work leads to reflections on the opera productions that he had staged not so long before it, emphasizing the elements fundamental to his compositions – light, time, space, architecture, and silence. The Conversation, followed by audience questions addressed to Wilson, took place live online and on Facebook on 4 December 2020 as a prelude to the Festival Internacional Santiago a Mil in Chile, which opened on 3 January 2021. This was the Festival’s twenty-eighth year, but in a significantly restricted form due to Covid-19. A sequel to the Santiago interchange, also online but this time located in Paris, occurred on 17 September 2021. It resumes dialogue mainly on the Watermill Center’s broader cultural and social goals in the present and for the future, noting as well Wilson’s then current activities in Paris: a heavy schedule of four productions from the beginning of September to the end of December 2021, and a sound installation planned for 2022. Maria Shevtsova gratefully thanks the Fundación Teatro a Mil and its General Director Carmen Romero for their initiative in inviting Robert Wilson with her to converse publicly as part of the Festival a Mil, and for permission to edit the transcript for publication in New Theatre Quarterly. Thanks are due to interpreters Margit Schmohl and Jorge Ramirez, and to Maria Luisa Vergara for organizing the audience participation included below, as well as to Alfonso Arenas, former Coordinator of the Education and Communities Area at the Theatre Foundation a Mil. Warmest gratitude is extended to Robert Wilson for his generosity in all sorts of ways, and not least for finding the time to continue the Conversation in Paris. Thanks for their kind support to Nuria Moreno, Production at Teatro Real Madrid, Christof Belka, Executive Director of RW Work Ltd, Clifford Allen, Director of Archives of the Watermill Center, and Leesa Kelly and Noah Khoshbin, curators of the 2021 outdoor exhibition Minneapolis Protest Murals at the Crossroads Summer Festival held at the Watermill Center. The exhibition presented 190 public artworks from the 900 boards of the Minneapolis Protest Murals which were created organically in Minneapolis following the murder of George Floyd on 25 May 2020. Special thanks for their gift of images are given to photographers Lucie Jansch, Javier del Real, Kristian Kruuser and Kaupo Kikkas, Lovik Delger Ostenrik, and Martyna Szczesna. Kunsang Kelden and Maria Shevtsova transcribed this Conversation in two parts. Shevtsova, Editor of New Theatre Quarterly and author of Robert Wilson (Routledge, 2007; updated edition, 2019) edited and annotated the combined transcript for publication.

Modern and contemporary artists working in relation to monumentality have sometimes positioned their works in relation to sf, and at other times works of monumental sculpture have been labeled as science-fictional by audiences to whom these monumental forms appear alien or displaced in time. While art history has sometimes examined the influence of sf ideas on modern and contemporary artists, a more sustained consideration of the relationship between monumentality and sf is lacking. One necessary step in advancing this understanding is a consideration of how monuments themselves have been represented in sf literature. This article examines the representations and roles of monuments in a number of sf works, including H.G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895), H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness (1936), Robert Charles Wilson's The Chronoliths (2001), and Kim Stanley Robinson's Icehenge (1984). The ways in which monuments appear in these and other sf texts foreground a set of questions about the perception of inevitability, the shape of time, and the mutability of history. These works explore how the relationship between past and future can be reconfigured through encounters with monumental forms that create new bridges and chronologies across cosmic and historical scales of time.