Lohengrin

Art in America, Sept, 1998 by Brooks Adams

Wherever we look, it seems, we see the shadow of the swan-knight, or as Wilson's safety curtain would have it, just one of his silvery blue wings. This motif, I learned from Robert Wilson's Byrd Hoffmann Foundation (a nonprofit organization that supports his work and administers the Watermill Center, his summer work-study compound on Long Island), was based on a dead goose that was found out there.

The iconography of birds has been present in Wilson's work since the late '60s, when he formed the Byrd Hoffmann School for Birds (named after a dance and speech teacher from his childhood in Waco, Texas) and impersonated a character called Bird Woman in several early performances. The Met's production, as different from his Zurich Lohengrin, must also be construed in part as an evocation of Wilson's own early avian role-playing as well as a product of the Watermill Center, his new Hamptons Valhalla. Wouldn't it be great if the rumors of his doing Wagner's Ring of the Nibelungen at Bayreuth, or anywhere else in Europe for that matter, turned out to be true? Having seen the Met's Lohengrin, I would be on the next plane, or swan boat, to see Wilson's Ring.