I was sitting on my patio ...

Forty-four years after creating I was sitting on my patio this guy appeared I thought I was hallucinating, Robert Wilson and Lucinda Childs pass along their roles to two new interpreters in this twinned one-person-show.

I was sitting on my patio… is a play of rupture. Robert Wilson produced it in 1977, barely a year after the heady energy of Einstein on the Beach. A plodding monologue fills the work with a senseless stream of associations and ideas, all framed in the stark purity of a monochromatic set and animated by movements at first angular, then feverish. This verbal channel-surfing, conveyed first by Robert Wilson in a jarring, haggard monologue, is then taken up by Lucinda Childs, who imbues him with the expressiveness of an internal collapse¾delivering, in the prism of its contradiction, a clinical minimalism, a formal austerity. Nothing happens—certainly not the arrival of “this guy” from the title and the first words of the work. Nothing happens, everything takes place; everything comes and comes back in this estrangement of self, then comes back again, like a carousel.

Frédéric Maurin for the Festival d’Automne à Paris

Photo: © Lucie Jansch