‘I’d never seen anything like it’: Lucinda Childs on the extraordinary worlds of Robert Wilson

The dancer and choreographer recalls five decades of collaboration with the visionary stage director, including Einstein on the BeachThere was a production of Bob’s in New York in 1975, A Letter for Queen Victoria, and some friends told me, “Oh, you should see this, it’s really amazing”. I was a dan

The dancer and choreographer recalls five decades of collaboration with the visionary stage director, including Einstein on the Beach

There was a production of Bob’s in New York in 1975, A Letter for Queen Victoria, and some friends told me, “Oh, you should see this, it’s really amazing”. I was a dancer and choreographer and I had worked with the Judson Dance Theatre – it was all about no music, pedestrian movement, performing in alternative spaces, avoiding all the traditional trappings. Here was Bob, though, in a theatre, with a composer and lighting … it was such a contemporary sensibility. I’d never seen anything like it.

I met Bob shortly thereafter at a festival, and he talked right away about working together on Einstein on the Beach [with composer Philip Glass]. We worked in his studio in lower Manhattan. Bob worked in a kind of improvisatory fashion. Day to day we were never sure if he was going to review what we had done or start again. You just would come up with something and run with it and see what happened. We would improvise day after day and narrow it down and see what worked. He was never entirely specific about what he wanted, but somehow he got exactly what he wanted. There was a lot of trust and he supported me in my work in such a strong way. It gave me a sense of freedom.