I was sitting on my patio ...
Robert Wilson
Lucinda Childs
Sep 20th - Oct 23rd, 2021

In 2021, Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels is supporting the Festival d’Automne à Paris in presenting Robert Wilson’s I was sitting on my patio this guy appeared I thought I was hallucinating.
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
About the artists

Robert Wilson
In 2021, Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels is supporting director Robert Wilson in the creation of BACH 6 SOLO in collaboration with Lucinda Childs. This piece, as well as the revival of I was sitting on my patio..., is presented as part of the 50th anniversary celebration of Festival d’Automne à Paris in co-production with Théâtre de la Ville.

Lucinda Childs
In 2021, Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels is supporting choreographer Lucinda Childs’ work BACH 6 SOLO in collaboration with Robert Wilson. This work, along with the reprise of I was sitting on my patio…, is presented as part of the 50th Festival d’Automne à Paris, co-produced by the Théâtre de la Ville.