Bob Wilson's final talk in Barcelona: "If anything remains, it will be the classical forms."

His only foray into an exhibition space had been in 2004, a production of the Forum of Cultures that invited him to redesign the Barbier Mueller Museum of Pre-Columbian Art, which he did with a series of miniature stage sets. Twenty years later, in the spring of 2024, the project was to show his preparatory drawings for the staging of Messiah, the production that brought him to the Liceu, with Mozart revisiting Handel's oratorio.

This newspaper had been able to learn about his working method and creative process when, in the summer of 2012 , the artist himself invited him to visit the Water Mill Center, his arts laboratory located in a large modern mansion in the Hamptons on Long Island. He opened his doors to emerging artists from around the world and also invited sacred cows to collaborate. This was the case that day with Mikhail Bayrshinkov. The two geniuses sat down to work for the first time in their lives, surrounded by disciples.

Bob Wilson never really thought of becoming a theater artist. It was life that led him in that direction. His first play was seven hours long and silent. It was about a deaf boy. He later did another one that lasted seven days. His collaborators ranged from a homeless man and an aristocrat to a psychologist, a housewife, and children with brain disorders. People he would never have met otherwise.

His training as an architect has always been at the heart of his creative process. While his drawings were being hung at the Senda gallery last year, Bob Wilson himself considered perspective, the weight of the works, and the time the viewer would spend... Before the gallery's inauguration, he held a conversation with La Vanguardia in which, as was often the case in this later stage of his life, he outlined his inspirations for creating. Here are some excerpts.

I was a child born with a classic sense of order and architecture, a child who collected stamps, postcards, coins and arranged them.

“I was a child born with a classic sense of order and architecture. A child who collected stamps, postcards, coins. And at a very early age, I arranged them all—postcards, stamps... I spent a lot of time doing that at the table, on the floor: I was concerned with order. Then, when I started doing theater, I became concerned with disorder. I was attracted to Piranesi, the draftsman from Rome, the architecture of Palladio, and later, that of Mies van der Rohe. I wasn't so interested in Frank Gehry. I was interested in classical architecture, which is simply a building [and this is where I began to draw] and a tree. The tree helps you see the building, and the building helps you see the tree. And their forms are very different.”

There are only two lines in the world, and you have to decide whether it's a straight line or a curved line. I always try to stick to that.

In theater, in ancient Greek theater, we have the protagonist, the antagonist, and the chorus, and in ballet there's the prima ballerina and the ballet chorus. And there are only two lines in the world, and you have to decide whether it's a straight line or a curved line. I always try to stick to this. So for those who've seen an opera, it starts with a dancer going back and forth, then he starts doing circles, and then a singer comes in and crosses from the back of the stage to the front. But what we see above him is a large sphere. The structure isn't important for people to see or understand. You can be aware of Mozart's structure, but that doesn't make you appreciate his music, but listening to the music itself does. What attracted me to Mozart's Messiah was the pure architecture: the way he organizes the score gives us enormous freedom. You know a soprano is singing, but he doesn't tell us who it is; he just indicates a high voice. Just like in the low voice. There's no character to characterize. That gives space. to penetrate the text and the music.”

I close my eyes and start listening more closely. And I see if I can create something on stage that helps me hear better than with my eyes closed.

“I've never had a problem thinking abstractly. When I came to New York to study architecture, I went to the theater and I didn't like it, and I still don't. Too much is going on, I can't really concentrate on the text because the lighting is bad, there's too much going on... I prefer to listen to the radio. And the same thing happens with music: I'd rather listen to a record than go to an opera. My challenge in doing something for the stage is to make it something that helps me concentrate on the music more than when I listen to it on the radio. I close my eyes. And when I close my eyes, I start listening more closely. And I see if I can create something on stage that helps me listen better than when my eyes are closed.”

I try to ensure that what I see doesn't illustrate what I hear. So there's a kind of parallelism and dualism of screens, which creates a tension."

“This worked for most of my stage works that took place in silence, because at first I didn't put on the music. I knew it, but I didn't want to illustrate what I was seeing with what I was hearing. I work on it separately, and with the singer, I prefer to rehearse in the dark, when I'm not distracted by what he sees. So you observe separately what you see and what you hear, and then put it together, and sometimes it doesn't work, but I try to make sure that what I see doesn't illustrate what I hear. So there's a kind of parallelism and dualism of screens, something I hear and something I see, and sometimes they come together and can illustrate one another. But sometimes they're parallel. So, in an ideal situation, they create a tension between what I hear and what I see. It's difficult. It's not just taking any opposite and putting them together, but trying to find the right opposite. Every opposite needs its opposite... And heaven and hell are one world, not two. This work, which you think of as spiritual work, is also, For me, it's these two worlds together. They have the most famous scene, the Hallelujah chorus. And for me, it's the destruction of these icebergs. And what we're experiencing now, with climate change, is a very difficult, very dark time. And that's the climax of the work. We're singing Hallelujah.

If the director tells you, in the scene, to go left, but you think you're going right and turn left, you get a very different experience."

“I have two hands. A left hand and a right hand, but it's one body. The left brain and the right brain, but it's one mind. I tell the performers this all the time, and when I draw, I also try to think about opposites: if I'm going to pick up a glass, it has to be as if at the same time as I'm going forward, I'm going backward. Because if I know I'm going to pick up the glass, nothing happens. If the director tells you, in the scene, that you're going left, and you think you're going right but you turn left, you get a very different experience. If the woman has to leave a tree branch below but feels she's going up, it's a different spatial experience. It's the same when you think about texts. The same thing happens with drawings: you have to decide what to do next. It's a bit like playing chess. If you listen to the work, it will tell you. Sometimes, when I'm working on something, even now, and I'm 82 years old, I don't know what I should do.”

"If anything exists in dance a hundred years from now, I think we'll look to what George Balanchine did. For me, he was the Mozart of the 20th century."

“When I first came to New York, I saw the work of George Balanchine and loved it. To me, he was the Mozart of the 20th century. If anything exists in dance a hundred years from now, I think we'll look to what he did. It's classical structure. If you look at the Greeks, the Romans, the Mayans, or the Chinese, we see classical mathematics, classical patterns. Human beings are always discerning the same mathematics. Socrates said that a baby is born knowing everything; it's the discovery of knowledge that is a learning process. And for me, rediscovering is always about the classics.”

When we did 'Einstein on the Beach,' people said, 'Oh, it's avant-garde!' And it wasn't: it was very classical and traditional.

“I’m still interested in classical structures. When Donald Judd made those hundreds of identical steel cubes in Marfa, Texas, and put them on the two barricades, there were people who said, ‘That’s a sculpture. ’ And I wrote an article for the Village Voice in New York and said that I believed that in 30 years—and that was 30 years ago—in 100 years, 200 years, or 300 years, if anything still exists, we’ll be looking at those cubes: they’re like pyramids, classical forms. When we did Einstein on the Beach , people said, ‘Oh, that’s avant-garde! ’ And it wasn’t: it was very classical and traditional: there were 1, 2, 3, 4 acts. The first time I encountered Philip Glass, the first thing I did was A, B, C, A, B, C, A, B, C: it was 4 acts and 3 themes. The theme of the variation was a narrative. And I said 1, 2, 3, 4, 5: 5 scenes of interlude. And very quickly, you can watch a five-hour opera in less than a minute. Because it's encoded in mathematics."

The best class I got was from Sibyl Moholy-Nagy. "You have three minutes to design a city," she said. "I drew an apple and placed a glass cube inside it."

“The best class I ever had in school was taught by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, who was married to Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, the Bauhaus architect. She taught a five-year history of architecture, and in the middle of the third year, she said, ‘You have three minutes to design a city. Come on! You have to think fast.’ I drew a city block and put a glass cube in it. ‘What are you thinking about?’ I said, ‘In a city, our communities need something like a glass cube in the center of a city block that can reflect the universe.’ In a medieval village, you had a cathedral, which was the center of the village, the highest point. Whether you were rich or poor, you could walk through the door; it was a place where musicians made music and played music, painters made paintings and showed paintings. It was the center of the village. And our communities need centers. In all my work, I keep it very simple so I can see the whole picture, and then I can work on the individual parts.”