Apr 22 - Jun 11, 2006
A limited engagement only at
The Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles
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Once upon time there was an old forester who lived with his wife and his daughter. And when it came time for his daughter to marry he chose for her a hunter, for he was getting old and wanting to maintain his legacy. But his daughter was in love with another and sadly he was not a huntsman, he was a clerk, and the father would not approve of this union. But the daughter was determined to marry the man she loved, so she said to him,
"If you can prove your marksmanship as a hunter, my father will allow us to marry."
And so the clerk went out to the forest and he took his rifle and he missed everything he aimed at and only brought back a vulture.
The father disapproved and it seemed hopeless, but the clerk was determined to triumph. So the next time he went to the forest, the Devil appeared to him and offered him a handful of magic bullets. With these bullets he could hit all the game he aimed at even with his eyes closed. But the Devil warned him that "some of these bullets are for thee and some are for me." And as the wedding day approached, the clerk began to get nervous, as there was to be a shooting contest and he was afraid he needed more magic bullets. Although warned that "the Devil's bargain is a fool's bargain," he went to the crossroads and the Devil appeared as before and gave him one more magic bullet. On the day of the wedding, the clerk took aim at a wooden dove, and with the Devil looking on, the bullet circled the crowd of guests and hit its mark. Not the wooden dove, but his bride, his only love, and the clerk ended up in an insane asylum stark raving mad and joined all the other lunatics in the Devil's carnival.
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"...utterly seductive and we float willingly from our seats into Wilson's unbelievable imagination..."
by RoseLee Goldberg
ArtForum, Feb 1994
Robert Wilson's The Black Rider is a delirious journey through a vivid theatrical landscape dotted with the signposts of vaudeville, cabaret, circus, and opera. A rousing and even bombastic overture--of horns and electric piano, drums and found pipes--sets the stage for an evening of splendid artifice.
In the opening scene we watch as a larger than man-size black box rises slowly from its horizontal coffinlike position on the floor, to an imposing vertical one. Like so many iridescent scarves from a magician's hat, a cast of 11 actors is pulled out one at a time from the black box by Pegleg, an unctuous master of ceremonies. White-faced with a gash of red mouth and darkened eye sockets, glistening black hair, and a train of spiked extensions that descend to the dragging tails of his evening jacket, he moves with a rhythmically sexy limp to center stage. Knees pinched together, the toes of his high heels kissing, he leads the chorus singing through his nose: "Come along with the Black Rider/We'll have a gay old time." That the singers' melody is a hybrid of musical themes--part Flinstones, part Cabaret, part Threepenny Opera--is not beside the point. Their emphatic familiarity is utterly seductive and we float willingly from our seats into Wilson's unbelievable imagination.
The text that we bump up against, and that jostles and jiggles the actors with their deadpan painted faces, wide eyes and splayed fingers, held, marionettelike, at or above shoulder level, is pure, uncut William Burroughs.
Based loosely on the German folk tale that inspired Carl Maria von Weber's 1821 opera Der Freischutz (The free-shooter)--the story of a simple clerk, Wilhelm, who must learn how to shoot (he doesn't want to) in order to marry his sweetheart Katchen and who makes a pact with the Devil toward that end--it is given a sardonic twist by Burroughs who compares the magic bullet in the original German fable to heroin.
Like most operas however, the narrative merely provides a flimsy line upon which to hang overscaled and stylized theatrical devices that the extraordinary Thalia Theater company executes with manic precision. Meanwhile Tom Waits' throatily sung music--with its lyrics of absurd death and profane love--swoops along with the text, coaxing tenderness from its freakish impulses. It is entirely consistent with the real focus of the work--an extended essay on the popular genres of cabaret, vaudeville, and mime, from Christopher Isherwood's Berlin to Charlie Chaplin's Hollywood.
Wilson's painted theater is supremely elegant. Gashes of Expressionistic scenery project us into the midst of something resembling Dr. Caligari's Cabinet, 1919, and onto angled beds that have the dizzying flourishes of Czech Cubist furniture. His fragile illusionary architecture, layered with diffused and neon lights, and punctuated by costumes that extend from the actors' bodies like papier-mache skirts over wire frames, is a superb container for their bold sculptural presence. Bustled and waist-coated in purples, blues, grays, blacks, and reds--a palette of 19th-century high drama--each actor, toward the end, wears white; drained of color these ghosts of theaters past file singly back into the black box. Only Pegleg remains to eulogize the art of theater in a final song about his rose garden.
- - - Click here for performance dates and tickets - - -
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Robert Wilson (Direction, Set & Lighting) was born in Waco, Texas, and educated at the University of Texas and the
Brooklyn's Pratt Institute, where he took an interest in architecture and design. Moving to New York in the mid 1960s,
Wilson found himself drawn to the work of pioneering choreographers George Balanchine, Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham,
among other artists. In 1969 two of Wilson's major productions appeared in New York City: The King of Spain and The Life
and Times of Sigmund Freud, which premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
In 1971, Wilson received international acclaim for Deafman Glance, a silent "opera" created in collaboration with Raymond Andrews, a talented deaf-mute boy whom Wilson had adopted. Wilson then went on to present numerous acclaimed productions throughout the world, including the seven-day play Ka MOUNTain and GUARDenia Terrace in Iran (1972); The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, a 12-hour silent opera (1973); and A Letter for Queen Victoria (1974). In 1976, Wilson joined with composer Philip Glass in writing the landmark work Einstein on the Beach, which was presented at the Festival d'Avignon and at New York's Metropolitan Opera House and has since been revived in two world tours (1984 and 1992).
After Einstein, Wilson worked increasingly with European theatres and opera houses. During this time, he created Death Destruction & Detroit (1979) and Death Destruction & Detroit II (1987). At the Thalia Theater in Hamburg he collaborated with Tom Waits and William S. Burroughs on The Black Rider (1990) and continued his alliance with Waits on Alice (1992). Hismost recent collaboration with Waits was an adaptation of Bchner's Woyzeck (2002), which toured nationally.
In addition to his work with Waits and Burroughs, Wilson has collaborated with a number of internationally acclaimed artists, writers and musicians, including Heiner Mller, David Byrne, Jessye Norman, Allen Ginsberg, Laurie Anderson, Susan Sontag, Lou Reed and Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon. Over the last two decades, Wilson has directed and designed operas at La Scala in Milan, the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Opra Bastille in Paris, Zurich Opera, Hamburg State Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago and Houston Grand Opera. In 2004 Wilson created a staged production of La Fontaine's The Fables for the Comdie Franaise in Paris, the second time in its history since 1680 that this legendary theatre company, founded by Molire, has commissioned a special work. Shortly after, Wilson created an original theatre work with music and dance based on one of the longest and most ancient sagas known to mankind, I la Galigo, an epic poem from South Sulawesi, featuring a cast of Indonesia's finest performers and musicians. The production toured Singapore, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Madrid, Lyon and Ravenna and will be presented at Lincoln Center in New York City in 2005.
A recipient of two Rockefeller and two Guggenheim fellowships, Wilson has been honored with numerous awards for excellence, including The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for lifetime achievement, the Golden Lion for sculpture of the Venice Biennale, the National Design Award for lifetime achievement from the Smithsonian Institution, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Each Summer Wilson develops new projects at his Watermill Center, a multidisciplinary arts laboratory located in eastern Long Island, New York, where he brings together an international group of artists in a collaborative and supportive environment. Currently work is underway to substantially renovate and expand the center. Monsters of Grace, Wilson's digital opera with Philip Glass, was the opening work in BITE at the Barbican in 1998. Since then, BITE has presented his productions of Strinberg's A Dream Play (2001) and Woyzeck (2002).
Tom Waits (Music and Lyrics), a unique lyricist, composer, and raconteur, began performing in the late 1960s, inspired by a spell working as a doorman in a San Diego nightclub, where he saw a miscellany of acts and, by absorbing portions of an attendant down-market patios, developed his nascent songwriting talent. After appearing at the Los Angeles Troubador "Amateur Hoot Nights," Waits was signed by manager Herb Cohen, who in turn secured a recording deal with Asylum Records. During the early part of his career, Waits released four albums - Closing Time (1973), The Heart of Saturday Night (1974), Nighthawks at the Diner (1975) and Small Change (1976) - before the dividing line between art and life grew increasingly blurred as Waits inhabited the flophouse life he sang about. At this time, he became more influenced by Beat writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and songwriter Bob Dylan. Waits' next three releases - Foreign Affairs (1977), Blue Valentine (1978) and Heartattack and Vine (1980) - unveiled a widening perspective, the latter two releases marked by their balance between lyrical ballads and upfront R&B
In 1983, Waits' new relationship with Island Records signaled a new musical direction with the release of the radical and groundbreaking Swordfishtrombones. Exotic instruments, sound textures and offbeat rhythms marked a content that owed more to Captain Beefheart and composer Harry Partch than to dowdy motel rooms. Waits also emphasized his interest in cinema with acting roles in Rumble Fish, The Cotton Club, Down by Law and Ironweed, in the process completing the exemplary Rain Dogs (1985). Waits' next release, Frank's Wild Years (1987), comprised material drawn from a play written with his wife, Kathleen Brennan, and based on a song from Swordfishtrombones. The follow-up, Big Time (1988), was the soundtrack to a concert film. Waits continued his cinematic career with roles in Candy Mountain and Cold Feet and in 1989 made his theatrical debut in Demon Wine. "Good Old World (Waltz)" was the standout track from his 1992 soundtrack to Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth. Waits' rhythmic experimentation came to fruition the same year on Bone Machine, considered by many his finest album. The following year's release of The Black Rider featured music from the stage play of the same name, a collaboration with Robert Wilson and William S. Burroughs. Waits also collaborated with Wilson on Alice (1992) and Woyzeck (2002).
A perplexing genius and cult figure, Waits maintained a recording silence through most of the 1990s, but made further movie appearances in Dracula, Short Cuts and Mystery Men. He left Island Records in 1998, although his legacy was celebrated on the superb Beautiful Maladies compilation. After signing with independent label Epitaph Records, he released Mule Variations (1999). The album broke into the UK Top Ten and won a Grammy Award in the United States. Waits is hardly a prolific writer, and his recent work has been confined to theatre and film soundtracks. His collaborations with director Robert Wilson have been of particular note, resulting in the release of two studio albums on the same day in May 2002: the romantic Alice, inspired by Lewis Carroll's books, and the bitter Blood Money, based on Georg Bchner's Woyzeck, which are two of Waits' finest yet most challenging recordings. As with most of his recent work, the albums were cowritten with his wife, Kathleen Brennan.
William S. Burroughs (Text) was born in 1914 in St. Louis, Missouri, the grandson of the inventor of the Burroughs assign machine. In his early 30s, Burroughs traveled to New York, where he met Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and his future partner, Joan Vollmer Adams. Burroughs took on the role of teacher, encouraging Kerouac and Ginsberg in their attempts to write fiction and poetry, but by his mid 30s Burroughs himself had still not begun to write.
At first indifferent to serious literary ideals, Burroughs was talked into writing Junky, a heroin-tinged autobiography, by his old friend Kells Elvins. Ginsberg arranged for its publication as a pulp paperback in 1953 under the pseudonym "William Lee." Burroughs followed this with a similar study of homosexuality, Queer, but this was too much even for the pulps, and would not be published for decades.
After Burroughs accidentally killed Joan Vollmer Adams in 1951 (in a tragically, drunken attempt to enact for friends the fateful scene from William Tell), their son went to live with Burroughs' parents, and Burroughs wandered the world from South America to Tangier. While his New York friends were becoming a popular sensation as the Beat Generation, Burroughs was living in Tangier, where he wrote the hundreds of pages that would eventually become the novel Naked Lunch. The book made him an underground celebrity and is widely considered his best work.
A film of Naked Lunch, directed by David Cronenberg, earned Burroughs much attention in the early 1990s. He has been cited as an inspiration by many musicians, and both the influential London psychedelic-scene band The Soft Machine and the American 1970s jazz-rock band Steely Dan took their names from his writings. In 1992 Kurt Cobain released an album with Burroughs, The Priest They Called Him, in which Cobain plays electric guitar over Burroughs' spoken voice. In later years, Burroughs spent a great deal of time as a painter and calligrapher. He was also an animal-rights activist and environmentalist, and supported a Duke University foundation dedicated to the survival of lemurs. He died on August 2, 1997, at the age of 83.
Information on the Cast coming soon...