How Robert Wilson’s Chance Encounters Guided His Career

The Unstoppables is a series about people whose ambition is undimmed by time. Below, Robert Wilson explains, in his own words, what continues to motivate him.

When I first came to New York, I worked in an Italian restaurant as a waiter and was fired. Then I worked in another Italian restaurant, this time as a dishwasher, and that was a job I liked. I was very good at organization, and I organized the entire restaurant, the supplies and the dinnerware, and left everything in perfect order. The owner wanted to keep me. I think of something my mother used to say: If they ask you to jump two feet, jump five.

I had grown up in central Texas, in Waco, and I didn’t know anything about anything. I came to New York to study architecture and, basically, to see the work of George Balanchine. I tried going to Broadway theater, and I didn’t really like it; went to the opera and liked that even less. But Balanchine, I would try to go every night. He was the first big influence: the staging, the classical compositions. I still feel that, if anything of our culture exists 200 years from now, it will be Balanchine.

In order to support myself, I began teaching children with learning difficulties in and around New York City. By chance, I met this deaf boy who knew no words — he thought only in terms of visual signs and signals. I had always wanted to be a painter, though I was not a very good one, and I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to work in theater. But I began to see that I could do onstage what I could not do on canvas, and out of this experience of meeting and working with a deaf boy, I developed a theatrical piece titled “Deafman Glance.”

The entirety of it is seven hours long, and it is silent. It was not that well received. I thought that would be the end of it. By chance, Jack Laing, the director of the avant-garde Festival of Nancy, saw it and invited me to show it in France.

Much to my surprise, we had a tremendous success. The poet Louis Aragon saw it and wrote a letter to André Breton saying, “It is the most beautiful thing of my life.” Pierre Cardin also saw it and said, “I want to take it to Paris and show it 10 times.” We opened in a 2,000-seat theater, which rather quickly sold out. For the next five and a half months, this play that was silent played to sold-out houses.

From then on, people asked me to make theater, and I began to find a theatrical language. I had never studied theater. If I had, if I had gone to Yale and studied drama, I would never have made the kind of theater I do.

Luck has always played a big role in my life. I was lucky when I first came here to be able to attend a Martha Graham rehearsal. She asked me, “Mr. Wilson, what do you want to do in life?” At the time I said: “I have no idea. I don’t really do anything well.” She told me, “Well, if you work long enough and hard enough, you’ll find something, even though nine times out of 10 it doesn’t work.”

That stuck with me. Gertrude Stein said that “artists need three things: first, encouragement; second, encouragement; third, encouragement.’’

To me, my work has never been work. It is a way of living, like breathing or walking. No one can teach you to walk, really. You learn by falling down and getting up. I’m 82, but I tend to forget my age unless I stop and think, “Wow, am I that old?”

As long as I have my curiosity and the desire to learn, I can’t imagine stopping. Often in the back of my head is the question “What, logically, should I do next?” Then I ask myself, “What should I not do?”

And I do that.

Recent and upcoming projects: Directed a theatrical version of Kipling’s “The Jungle Book” in Manchester, England, and directed a premiere of “Mary Said What She Said,” about Mary, Queen of Scots, in London, Paris and Stockholm. He will direct a revival of his version of “Madama Butterfly” at the Opéra Bastille in Paris in September, as well as a world premiere of the theater piece “Moby Dick” at the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus in Düsseldorf, Germany. In addition, he serves as the artistic director of the Watermill Center in Water Mill, N.Y.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.