CAL PERFORMANCES 19

Friday, November 21, 2014, 8pmSaturday, November 22, 2014, 8pmSunday, November 23, 2014, 3pm

Zellerbach Hall

Cal Performances’ 2014–2015 season is sponsored by Wells Fargo.

Robert Wilson Mikhail Baryshnikov Willem Dafoe

The Old Woman

A Baryshnikov Productions, Change Performing Arts, and The Watermill Center project.

Commissioned and co-produced by Manchester International Festival, Spoleto Festivaldei 2Mondi, Théâtre de la Ville-Paris/Festival d’Automne à Paris, and deSingel Antwerp.

Executive Producer Change Performing Arts, in collaboration with Baryshnikov Productionsand Centro Ricerche Teatrali.

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PROGRAM

The Old Woman

Robert WilsonDirection, Set Design, Lighting Concept

with Mikhail Baryshnikov and Willem Dafoe

by Daniil Kharms

Adaptation Darryl PinckneyMusic Hal Willner

Costume Design Jacques ReynaudLight Design A. J. Weissbard

Associate Set Design Annick Lavallée-BennySound Design Marco Olivieri

Assistant Directors Charles Otte, Lynsey PeisingerDramaturg Tilman Hecker

Stage Manager Jane RosenbaumTechnical Director Reinhard Bichsel

Lighting Supervisor Marcello LumacaStage Technician Chris McKee

Follow Spots Roberto Gelmetti, Elisa BortolussiAssistant Costume Design Micol Notarianni

Assistant Stage Manager Louise MartinMakeup Marielle Loubet, Natalia Leniartek

Company Manager Simona Fremder

MUSIC CREDITS

“Bye Bye Blues” by Frederick Hamm, David Bennett, Bert Lorn, and Chauncey Gray by permission of Bourne Co.

“Good Night Sweetheart” by Jimmy Campbell, Ray Noble, and Reginald Connelly by permission of Music SalesCorporation.

“Here’s Charlie (Charlie Bratton)” by Benny Davis, Jackie Gleason, and Murray Mencher by permission of Len FreedmanMusic and Songwriters Guild of America.

“I’ll Be Home” by Randy Newman by permission of Warner/Chappell Music, Inc.

“Innocent When You Dream” by Thomas A. Waits by permission of Jalma Music.

“Rosie,” Traditional.

Spiegel im Spiegel for Violin by Arvo Pärt by permission of Schott Music Corporation.

“Tiger Rag” with music by James Larocca. Eddie Edwards, Henry Ragas, Tony Sbarbaro, and Larry Shields and lyrics byHarry DeCosta by permission of EMI Entertainment World, Inc.

Music clearance by BZ/Rights and Permissions, Inc.

CAL PERFORMANCES

PROGRAM NOTES

DEVELOPED WITH, and starring, legendarydancer and actor Mikhail Baryshnikov,

and co-starring world-renowned actorWillem Dafoe, The Old Woman is an adapta-tion of the work of the same name by Russianauthor Daniil Kharms.

Born in St. Petersburg in 1905, Kharms suf-fered through Stalinist rule for much of hislife; eventually, he was arrested, imprisoned,and killed by Soviet soldiers in the Gulags atage 36. The shortness of Kharms’s life paral-lels the brevity of his absurdist writings, someof which stretch to little more than a para-graph. One exception is The Old Woman, anobscure, brilliant, and slyly political novellawritten in the 1930s.

Carrying echoes of Beckett and Ionesco inits deadpan narrative, The Old Woman is per-haps the finest work by one of the great avant-garde Russian authors, following the story ofa struggling writer who cannot find peacewith himself.

An old lady is standing in the courtyardand holding a wall clock in her hands. Iwalk past the old woman, stop, and askher, “What time is it?”

“You look,” the old woman says to me.

I look and see that the clock has no hands.

“There are no hands,” I say.

The old woman looks at the face of the clock and says to me, “It’s a quarter to three.”

* * *

For many years, Misha and I had discussedcreating a work together. One of our ideas wasto use a Russian text. Several years ago,Wolfgang Wiens suggested The Old Woman.Although we were familiar with other worksby Kharms, neither of us had heard of thisstory, but once we read it we liked the idea.

I thought that Darryl Pinckney would bethe perfect person to adapt it. Darryl has beena friend and artistic collaborator for manyyears, and he knows my work very well. Heagreed to do it and had a first translation anddramatic text adaptation in a little more thanthree months. Change Performing Arts andBaryshnikov Productions agreed to producethe work, and the Manchester InternationalFestival commissioned and produced it, part-nering with the Spoleto Festival in Italy, theThéâtre de la Ville/Festival d’Automne inParis, and deSingel in Antwerp.

In summer 2012, we held a workshop at theWatermilll Center for a few days to find a di-rection for the production and to help Mishaand I understand each other’s ways of work-ing. Then, in spring this year, I started re-hearsals in Spoleto with almost no idea ofwhat to do: I hadn’t decided who would speakwhich text, or even what the stage would looklike. I began to shape the piece in terms oflight, scenery, and movement, and slowlybegan to add text. I worked on all the elementsat the same time.

I generally start with the light first and thenthe movement, adding text and audio ele-ments later. I sketch a scene, then go to thenext scene and see what differs from what hasgone before. Eventually, once I have a draft forthe whole work, I go back to the start, andbegin to make alterations and add more detail. Finally, I work with makeup and cos-tumes and define the time-space construc-tion. I often move things around until theparts seem to support or complement one another. Since there is no single narrative, one is allowed a certain freedom to constructand deconstruct.

I have chosen the two actors, Misha andWillem, because I think they complement

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PROGRAM NOTES

each other with their different personas. Ithink of the two as one: the writer. And duringthe course of the play, they change: A becomesB and B becomes A, because A and B are onewhole, not two.

Robert Wilson

* * *

Working with Bob Wilson isn’t an easy task.The rehearsal process is intense and demand-ing and requires a versatility I’ve never had toaccess before. One minute you’re a silentmovie actor, the next a vaudevillian, the nexta noh theater performer. This is in addition toBob’s precise staging and lighting. It’s restric-tive in a way, but ultimately he gives his per-formers freedom to find the extremes he’slooking for.

Of course, Willem Dafoe, an incredibly arresting and layered actor, made it easier forme to decode Bob’s almost painterly approachto the creative process. He has worked withBob before and taught me a lot about a certainkind of patience.

I think Daniil Kharms’s The Old Woman isa brilliant piece of absurdist literature. In thehands of Bob Wilson and his talented creativeteam, along with an extraordinary fellow actor(I am the rookie in this mix), all we need is theaudience, and we’ll see what we have.

Mikhail Baryshnikov

* * *

I heard Bob Wilson say recently that onething he’s learned through the years is “toenter the rehearsal room with no ideas, witha blank book.”

Rather than trying to make what’s in hishead, he prefers to see what is in the room,hear the text, listen to the music, play with thespace light and scenic elements, create a struc-ture for the actors.

As refined as his theater is, there is nothingpedantic about his approach.

When Bob proposed The Old Woman, Iknew I would be partnering with the leg-endary Mikhail Baryshnikov (whom I had ad-mired since I was a young man), but it wasn’tat all clear which character I would play. Thetext was divided simply between two per-formers, “A” and “B.” I asked Bob who was “A”and who was “B,” and he told me he didn’tknow yet.

In The Life and Death of Marina Abramović,at the beginning there was a similar ambiguityin what my role or function would be. In theend, it was so inspiring, and I loved so muchworking with Bob, that I was emboldened totake the leap to work on The Old Woman.

It’s always mysterious to be part of an orig-inal work. As Bob says, “If you know what it is,what’s the point of doing it?”

Willem Dafoe

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DANIIL KHARMS was born in St. Petersburgin 1905, the year of the bloody massacre

in front of the Winter Palace, and he died inwhat was then called Leningrad in 1942, whenthe city was under blockade. They say he mayhave died of starvation in his cell. In certainphotographs, he looks like what Mayakovskywould have ended up looking like had he notkilled himself. To look at certain photographsof Kharms, gaunt and wild-eyed, is to re-member that he had been having a difficulttime long before he was imprisoned in 1941.Kharms had been arrested before, in 1931,when Soviet authority criminalized the avant-garde in the arts. Mayakovsky had shot him-self in 1930, signaling the end of artisticexperiment under the Revolution. The fol-lowing year, Pasternak mourned “the blackvelvet of his talent” in Safe Conduct and re-treated from Stalin on the other end of thewire. Kharms, too, made his retreat, into chil-dren’s literature, he who is said to have de-spised children. The disguise didn’t work; hislast decade was harassed. If there was war allaround him when he died, he also had friendsin the besieged city. One of them dragged asuitcase of his manuscripts from his apart-ment and kept it hidden until the 1960s. In the1920s, when the civil war ended, Kharms hadbeen a dandy, a young man of small, rapidflamboyant acts about town. His presence wasa sort of performance art. Kharms came of agein that last moment of cultural freedom, whenthere was still some optimism about the rev-olution, because although Bolshevik violencehad been transformed into state power thecommissars hadn’t entirely figured out whatto do with culture. The sheer high spirits of

being young pushed away World War I and itslegacy of carnage. The absurdist mood savedartists like Kharms from the cynicism that wasmaking the Jazz Age desperate for so manyacross Europe. But, then, the lightness ofKharms, his deft, noiseless style, perhapscame from his inner knowledge about whatwas coming. After all, he had grown up withRussian history. His father had been a mem-ber of the People’s Will, the terrorist groupthat assassinated Alexander II in 1883. Theimperial government executed thousands ofterrorists in the late 19th and early 20th cen-turies, just as the terrorists executed thou-sands of imperial officials in the same period.Kharms’s work only seems innocent andcomic—all those freak accidents and all thatslapstick-like violence. Underneath, he knewsomething about the murderous impulse, sud-den and senseless. His stories and poems arenot overtly oppositional or even codedprotest, but his writing is rather like stalksgrown up in the cracks of the sidewalk—there,in spite of everything, starting with the heav-iness of human traffic. His stories are brief,often mere paragraphs, and what happens inthem can be nonsense, over and over.Everything about them is improvisational infeeling, random, unreliable, as fragile as life it-self. These works are not necessarily portraitsof the individual deformed by totalitarianrule. They are not Kafka; they don’t have hisinterest in systems. Instead, they speak of thehelplessness of being alive, of the propertiesof consciousness, of how the mind goes onthinking and willing and living, even in themiddle of nightmare.

Darryl Pinckney

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SYNOPSIS

The Old WomanScene 1Hunger poem

Scene 2An old woman holds a clock that has no hands. The writer asks for thetime. The old woman tells him the time.

Scene 3The writer meets his friend on the street. He tells him about women fallingout of the window.

Scene 4At home, the writer wants to work on a story. The old woman enters hisroom and orders him around. She sits in his chair and dies.

Scene 5Dream poem 1

Scene 6The writer meets a young lady at the bakery. They decide to go to his place.

Scene 7At his friend’s house, the writer tells him about the young lady. He couldn’tbring her home because he remembered he had a dead old woman in his room.

Scene 8The writer comes home to find the old woman crawling on the floor. Hewants to kill her with a mallet.

Scene 9Dream poem 2

Scene 10A nightmare about the murder of the old woman. The writer puts the oldwoman into a suitcase.

Scene 11The writer gets on a train with the suitcase. The suitcase disappears.

Scene 12An old woman holds a clock that has no hands. The writer asks for thetime. The old woman tells him the time.

Epilogue

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ABOUT THE ARTISTS

CREATIVE TEAM

The New York Times has described Robert Wilsonas “a towering figure in the world of experimentaltheater and an explorer in the uses of time andspace on stage. Transcending theatrical convention,he draws in other performance and graphic arts,which coalesce into an integrated tapestry of im-ages and sounds.” Susan Sontag has said of Mr. Wilson’s work, “it has the signature of a majorartistic creation. I can’t think of any body of work aslarge or as influential.”

Born in Waco, Texas, Mr. Wilson was edu-cated at the University of Texas and Brooklyn’sPratt Institute, where he took an interest in ar-chitecture and design. He studied painting withGeorge McNeil in Paris and later worked withthe architect Paolo Solari in Arizona. Moving to New York City in the mid-1960s, Mr. Wilsonfound himself drawn to the work of pioneeringchoreographers George Balanchine, MerceCunningham, and Martha Graham, among others artists. By 1968, he had gathered a groupof artists known as the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, and together they worked and per-formed in a loft building at 147 Spring Street inlower Manhattan.

In 1969, two of Mr. Wilson’s major productionsappeared in New York City: The King of Spain at theAnderson Theater, and The Life and Times ofSigmund Freud, which premièred at the BrooklynAcademy of Music. In 1971, Mr. Wilson received in-ternational acclaim for Deafman Glance (Le Regarddu Sourd), a silent opera created in collaborationwith Raymond Andrews, a talented deaf-mute boywhom Mr. Wilson had adopted. After the Paris pre-mière of the work, French Surrealist Louis Aragonwrote of Mr. Wilson, “he is what we, from whomSurrealism was born, dreamed would come after usand go beyond us.” Mr. Wilson then went on to pres-ent numerous acclaimed productions throughoutthe world, including the seven-day play KAMOUNTain and GUARDenia Terrace in Shiraz, Iran(1972); The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, a 12-hoursilent opera performed in New York, Europe, andSouth America (1973); and A Letter for QueenVictoria in Europe and New York (1974–1975). In1976, Mr. Wilson joined with composer Philip Glassin writing the landmark work Einstein on the Beach,which was presented at the Festival d’Avignon and atNew York’s Metropolitan Opera House, and hassince been revived in three world tours, in 1984,1992, and 2012–2014.

After Einstein, Mr. Wilson increasingly workedwith European theaters and opera houses. Hisproductions were frequently featured at theFestival d’Automne in Paris, the Schaubühne inBerlin, the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, and theSalzburg Festival, among many other venues. Atthe Schaubühne, he created Death Destruction &Detroit (1979) and Death Destruction & Detroit II(1987); and at the Thalia he presented fourgroundbreaking musical works, The Black Rider(1991), Alice (1992), Time Rocker (1996), andPOEtry (2000).

In the early 1980s, Mr. Wilson developed whatstill stands as his most ambitious project: themultinational epic the CIVIL warS: a tree is bestmeasured when it is down. Created in collabora-tion with an international group of artists, Mr. Wilson planned this opera as the centerpieceof the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles.Although the full epic was never seen in its en-tirety, individual parts have been produced in theUnited States, Europe, and Japan.

Mr. Wilson has designed and directed operas atLa Scala in Milan, the Metropolitan Opera in NewYork, Opéra Bastille in Paris, the Zürich Opera, theHamburg State Opera, the Lyric Opera of Chicago,Houston Grand Opera, and the Moscow Bolshoi,among others. His productions include Salome(Milan, 1987), Parsifal (Hamburg, 1991), TheMagic Flute (Paris, 1991), Lohengrin (Zürich,1991), Madame Butterfly (Paris, 1993), Bluebeard’sCastle and Erwartung (Salzburg, 1995), Four Saintsin Three Acts (Houston, 1996), Pelléas et Mélisande(Salzburg, 1997), Orpheus and Eurydice (Paris,1999), Der Ring des Nibelungen (Zürich, 2000–2002), Aida (Brussels, 2002), Janáček’s Osud(Prague, 2002), Die Frau ohne Schatten (Paris,2003), Gluck’s Alceste (Brussels, 2004), Bach’sJohannes-Passion (Paris, 2007), Brecht and Weill’sThe Threepenny Opera (Berlin, 2007), Gounod’sFaust (Warsaw, 2008), Der Freischütz (Baden-Baden, 2009), Káťa Kabanová (Prague, 2010),Norma (Zürich, 2011), Verdi’s Macbeth (Bolognaand São Paulo, 2013), as well as a Monteverdi tril-ogy consisting of L’Orfeo (2009), Il Ritorno d’Ulissein Patria (2011), and L’incoronazione di Poppea(2014) in Milan and Paris.

He has presented innovative adaptations ofworks by such writers as Virginia Woolf (Orlando,Berlin, 1989), Henrik Ibsen (When We DeadAwaken, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1991; Ladyfrom the Sea, Ferrara, 1998; Peer Gynt, Oslo, 2005),Gertrude Stein (Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights,

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Berlin, 1992; Saints and Singing, Berlin, 1997),Wole Soyinka (Scourge of Hyacinths, Geneva,1999), Georg Büchner (Woyzeck, Copenhagen,2000), Jean de la Fontaine (Les Fables de laFontaine, Paris, 2004), Samuel Beckett (HappyDays, Luxembourg, 2008; Krapp’s Last Tape,Spoleto, 2009), and Homer (Odyssey, Athens,2012). His longstanding love of Indonesia led Mr. Wilson to direct I La Galigo (Singapore, 2004),a play based on a sacred text from SouthwestSulawesi. He later directed Rumi: in the blink of theeye (Athens, 2007), based on Sufi mystic poetry.

Mr. Wilson has collaborated with a number ofinternationally acclaimed artists, writers, and mu-sicians. He worked closely with the late Germanplaywright Heiner Müller on the Cologne sectionof the CIVIL warS (1984), Hamletmachine (1986),and Quartet (1987). With singer-songwriter TomWaits, Mr. Wilson created the highly successfulproduction The Black Rider: The Casting of theMagic Bullets (Hamburg, 1991), as well as Alice(Hamburg, 1992) and Woyzeck (Copenhagen,2000). With David Byrne, Mr. Wilson staged TheKnee Plays from the CIVIL warS (1984), and laterThe Forest, in honor of the 750th anniversary ofthe City of Berlin (1988). He worked with poetAllen Ginsberg on Cosmopolitan Greetings (1988)and with performance artist Laurie Anderson onMr. Wilson’s adaptation of Euripides’s Alcestis(1986). Writer Susan Sontag joined Mr. Wilsonin creating Alice in Bed (1993), and together theydeveloped a new work, Lady from the Sea (1998),based on Ibsen’s classic and since revived in manydifferent languages. Mr. Wilson’s long associationwith noted opera singer Jessye Norman beganwith Great Day in the Morning (Paris, 1982) andcontinued with a stage and video work based onFranz Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise in 2001.Other important collaborations include TheTemptation of St. Anthony (Duisburg, 2003) andZinnias (Montclair, 2013) with Dr. BerniceJohnson Reagon; Büchner’s Leonce and Lena(Berlin, 2003) with Herbert Grönemeyer; The Lifeand Death of Marina Abramović (Manchester,2011) with Antony; and Peter Pan (Berlin, 2013)with CocoRosie.

A recipient of two Rockefeller and twoGuggenheim fellowships, Mr. Wilson has beenhonored with numerous awards for excellence. In1986, Mr. Wilson was the sole nominee for thePulitzer Prize in Drama for the CIVIL warS. He re-ceived two Hewes Design Awards for A Letter toQueen Victoria (1975) and the CIVIL warS Act V

(1987); a Bessie Award for The Knee Plays (1987);two Italian Premio Ubu awards for Alice andDoctor Faustus Lights the Lights (1994 and 1992);the Golden Lion Award for Sculpture of theVenice Biennale for Memory/Loss (1993); theGerman Theater Critics Award for The BlackRider (1990); a Reumert Prize for Woyzeck(2001); the Smithsonian National Design Award(2001); the French Theater Critics Award for ADream Play (2002); an International Design andCommunication Award for Mind Gap (2012); andan Olivier Award for Einstein on the Beach as “BestNew Opera Production” (2013).

Mr. Wilson was honored with several lifetimeachievement awards, including the Dorothy andLillian Gish Prize (1996), Premio Europa forTheater (Taormina, 1997), Tadeusz Kantor Prize(Kraków, 1997), Pushkin Prize (Moscow, 1999),Rosa d’Oro (Palermo, 2007), Prix Italian (2012),and Fendi Foundation Award (2012). He hasbeen named a “Lion of the Performing Arts” bythe New York Public Library (1989) and “TexasArtist of the Year” by the Art League of Houston(1995), received an Institute Honor from theAmerican Institute of Architects in New YorkCity (1988) and the Harvard Excellence inDesign Award (1998), and was elected to theAmerican Academy of Arts and Letters (2000).France pronounced him Commandeur des Artset des Lettres in 2003.

Mr. Wilson holds honorary doctoral degreesfrom the Pratt Institute (1991), CaliforniaCollege of Arts and Crafts (1994), University ofToronto (2005), University of Bucharest (2008),American University of Paris (2010), and CityUniversity of New York (2013). In 1997, April 18was declared “Robert Wilson Day” by the legisla-ture in the State of Texas.

Since the early 1990s, Mr. Wilson has heldworkshops for students and experienced creativeprofessionals from around the world at theInternational Summer Arts Program at TheWatermill Center in Eastern Long Island—an in-terdisciplinary laboratory for the Arts andHumanities. Following a successful capital cam-paign, construction of a permanent facility wascompleted in summer 2006, enabling the ByrdHoffman Water Mill Foundation to offer residen-cies, lectures, performances, and educational pro-grams throughout the year.

A native of Riga, Latvia, Mikhail Baryshnikovwasborn in 1948 and began studying ballet at the age

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ABOUT THE ARTISTS

of nine. As a teenager he moved to Leningrad,where he entered the Vaganova ChoreographicSchool, graduating from student to principaldancer of the Kirov Ballet in 1969.

In 1974, he left the Soviet Union to dance withmajor ballet companies around the world, in-cluding the New York City Ballet, where heworked with George Balanchine and JeromeRobbins. In 1980, he began a ten-year tenure as Artistic Director of American Ballet Theatre, nurturing a new generation of dancersand choreographers. From 1990 to 2002, Mr. Baryshnikov was director and principaldancer with the White Oak Dance Project, whichhe co-founded with choreographer Mark Morris.White Oak was born of Mr. Baryshnikov’s desire“to be a driving force in the production of art,”and, indeed, it expanded the repertoire and visibil-ity of American modern dance. In theater, he has per-formed on and off Broadway in Meta morphosis(Tony Award nomination, Drama Desk Award),Forbidden Christmas, or the Doctor and thePatient (Lincoln Center Festival), Beckett Shorts(New York Theatre Workshop), In Paris (BroadStage, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, SpoletoFestival, Lincoln Center Festival, internationaltour), and Man in a Case (U.S. tour). His work infilm and television includes The Turning Point(Academy Award nomination), White Nights,and various television shows, including threeEmmy Award-winning specials.

In 2005, he opened the Baryshnikov ArtsCenter (BAC), a creative home for local and in-ternational artists to develop and present work.BAC also presents contemporary, innovative workby artists from the worlds of dance, theater, music,and film at low or no cost to the public. Under hisleadership as Artistic Director, BAC programsserve approximately 500 artists and more than20,000 audience members each year. Among Mr. Baryshnikov’s many awards are the KennedyCenter Honors, the National Medal of Honor, theCommonwealth Award, the Chubb Fellowship,the Jerome Robbins Award, and the 2012 VilcekAward. In 2010, he was given the rank of Officerof the French Legion of Honor.

In 1979, Willem Dafoe was given a small role inMichael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate from which hewas fired. His first feature role came shortly afterin Kathryn Bigelow’s The Loveless.

From there, he went on to perform in over 90films, in Hollywood (Spider-Man, The English

Patient, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Clear andPresent Danger, White Sands, Mississippi Burning,Streets of Fire, American Dreamz) and in inde-pendent cinema in the United States (TheClearing, Animal Factory, The Boondock Saints,American Psycho) and abroad (TheoAngelopoulos’s The Dust of Time, Yim Ho’sPavilion of Women, Yurek Bogayevicz’s Edges ofthe Lord, Wim Wenders’s Faraway, So Close,Nobuhiro Suwa’s segment of Paris, je t’aime,Brian Gilbert’s Tom & Viv, Christian Carion’sFarewell, Mr. Bean’s Holiday, the Spierig brothers’Daybreakers, Daniel Nettheim’s The Hunter).

He has chosen projects for diversity of roles andopportunities to work with strong directors. Hehas worked in the films of Wes Anderson (The LifeAquatic, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Grand Budapest Hotel),Martin Scorsese (The Aviator, The Last Temptationof Christ), Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo, JohnCarter), Spike Lee (Inside Man), Julian Schnabel(Miral, Basquiat), Paul Schrader (Auto Focus,Affliction, Light Sleeper, The Walker, AdamResurrected), David Cronenberg (Existenz), AbelFerrara (444: The Last Day on Earth, Go Go Tales,New Rose Hotel), David Lynch (Wild at Heart),William Friedkin (To Live and Die in L.A.),Werner Herzog (My Son, My Son, What Have YeDone), Oliver Stone (Born on the Fourth of July,Platoon), Giada Colagrande (A Woman, Before ItHad a Name), and Lars von Trier (Antichrist,Manderlay, Nymphomaniac).

Mr. Dafoe was nominated twice for theAcademy Award (Platoon, Shadow of the Vampire)and once for the Golden Globe. Among othernominations and awards, he received a LosAngeles Film Critics Award and an IndependentSpirit Award. His recent films include JoshBoones’s The Fault in Our Stars, Anton Corbjin’s AMost Wanted Man, Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini, andDavid Leitch and Chad Stahelski’s John Wick.

Mr. Dafoe is one of the original members ofthe Wooster Group, the New York-based exper-imental theater collective. He created and per-formed in all of the group’s work from 1977through 2005, both in the United States and in-ternationally. Since then, he worked with RichardForeman in Idiot Savant at New York’s PublicTheater and, most recently, with Robert Wilsonin The Life and Death of Marina Abramović andThe Old Woman.

Darryl Pinckney (writer) is the author of a novel,High Cotton, published in 1992, and, in the Alain

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Locke Lecture Series, Out There: Mavericks ofBlack Literature (2002). A frequent contributor toThe New York Review of Books, he wrote the textsfor Robert Wilson’s productions of The Forest(1988) and Time Rocker (1995) and made theadaptation for Mr. Wilson’s production of VirginiaWoolf ’s Orlando (1989). In 1994 he received theHarold D. Vursell Award for Distinguished Prosefrom the American Academy of Arts and Letters,and in 2013 an Award in Literature, also from theAcademy. He is at work on a history of African-American literature in the 20th century.

Hal Willner (music) is a music producer work-ing in records, films, television, theater and liveevents. He is best known for having conceivedand produced many concept albums beginningwith Amarcord Nino Rota in 1981 and his morethan three-decade-long stint providing “sketchmusic adaptations” for Saturday Night Live. TheOld Woman is the sixth project on which Mr. Willner has collaborated with Robert Wilsonas music adaptor and producer, the others beingA Night at Koi Pond (Nagoya, Japan), The WhiteTown (Copenhagen), Lulu (Berlin), Homer’s TheOdyssey (Athens), and The 30th Anniversary ofSolidarity Celebration (Gdansk, Poland).

Mr. Willner’s multi-artist tribute records in-clude That’s The Way I Feel Now: A Tribute toThelonious Monk (1984), Lost in the Stars: TheMusic of Kurt Weill (1985), Stay Awake: VariousInterpretations of Music from Vintage DisneyFilms (1988), Weird Nightmare: Meditations onMingus (1992), Rogue’s Gallery: Pirate Ballads,Sea Songs, and Chanteys (2006), and Son ofRogue’s Gallery (2013).

Mr. Willner’s film work as music producer, su-pervisor, and composer include Robert Frank andRudy Wurlitzer’s Candy Mountain, RobertAltman’s Short Cuts and Kansas City, Greg Ford’sNight of the Living Duck, Gus Van Sant’s FindingForrester, Wim Wenders’s Million Dollar Hotel,Abel Ferrara’s Chelsea on the Rocks, MartinScorsese’s Gangs of New York, Matt Piedmont’sCasa de Mi Padre, Adam McKay’s Talledega Nights,and John Hillcoat’s Lawless.

In addition, Mr. Willner has produced his ownconcept shows at the Sydney Opera House,London’s Royal Festival Hall and BarbicanCentre, Arts at St. Ann’s, Celebrate Brooklyn,Central Park Summerstage, Poetry Project at St. Mark’s, Issue Project Room, Carnegie Hall,Lincoln Center, and elsewhere. Mr. Willner also

served as Artist in Residence at UCLA Arts atRoyce Hall in the 2004–2005 season. He has re-leased one album under his own name, Whoops,I’m an Indian, which featured audio samplesfrom 78rpm records from the early and mid-20thcentury. Mr. Willner also co-hosted New YorkShuffle, a weekly program with Lou Reed onSirius Radio/XM.

Jacques Reynaud (costumes) is a French-Italiancostume designer. Since graduating from NewYork University, he has worked in Europe and inthe United States, at the Teatro alla Scala inMilano, the Salzburg Festival, the BerlinerEnsemble, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, LincolnCenter, Thalia Theater in Hamburg, La MonnaieOpera in Brussels, and many other venues. Hisdébut as a costume designer was in 1993 in PeerGynt directed by Luca Ronconi with whom healso collaborated in 2001 at Nuovo PiccoloTeatro in Milan. Mr. Reynaud has collaboratedwith Robert Wilson on numerous productionsincluding Leonce and Lena, The Winter’s Tale,Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Lulu, Peter Pan at theBerliner Ensemble, L’Orfeo and Il Ritorno diUlisse in Patria at Teatro all Scala, and The Lifeand Death of Marina Abramović at MIF 2011.

Based in Rome, American lighting designer A. J.Weissbard (lighting designer) has worked world-wide designing for theater, video, exhibition,permanent architectural installation, and specialevents. His collaborations include projects withRobert Wilson, Peter Stein, Luca Ronconi,Daniele Abbado, Bernard Sobel, PeterGreenaway, William Kentridge, Fabrizio Plessi,Giorgio Armani, Pierluigi Cerri, RichardGluckman, Matteo Thun, Fabio Novembre,Shirin Neshat, David Cronenberg, and theMartha Graham Dance Company. His work hasbeen seen presented in major opera houses, fes-tivals, theaters, and other sites in more than 40countries, including the Palais Garnier, Théâtredu Châtelet, Teatro alla Scala, Teatro San Carlo,Royal Opera House in Oman, Lincoln Center,BAM, the Guggenheim in New York and Bilbao,Venice Biennale, and Aichi World Expo. He wasrecently awarded the first IFSArts award forlighting design.

Annick Lavallée-Benny (associate set designer)was born in Québec, where she first studied set and costume design. After a few years of

CAL PERFORMANCES

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

practice in Montréal, she engaged into contem-porary performance making at the NorwegianTheatre Academy, where she completed a degreein scenography.

Ms. Lavallée-Benny was awarded the GoldMedal for Most Promising Talent at the PragueQuadrennial 2011 in recognition of a site specificlarge scale installation project. Now alternatingbasis between Montréal and Berlin, she works asa freelancer at the meeting point of architecture,visual arts, and theater.

She has collaborated on several productionswith Robert Wilson in recent years, including theMonteverdi cycle at La Scala and Opéra Nationalde Paris, Verdi’s Macbeth in São Paolo andBologna, and The Life and Death of MarinaAbramović in New York.

Sound designer and composer Marco Olivieri(sound design) has collaborated with many musi-cians and artists for both the live stage and studiorecordings. He has worked with Patti Smith, LouReed, Goran Bregović, Modena City Ramblers,Noa, Eugenio Finardi, and Elio e le Storie Tese,among others. In theater he has collaborated inseveral multimedia projects with such artists asSocietas Raffaello Sanzio, Eimuntas Nekrosius,Pippo Delbono, Alvis Hermanis, Cesare Lievi,Roberto Andò, and Elio De Capitani.

Charles Otte (assistant director) is a multimedia di-rector and designer whose work crosses multipleplatforms. He is currently a senior creative directorwith Thinkwell Group in Los Angeles. An M.F.A.graduate of U.S.C. film school, he received the JohnHuston award for directing excellence and recentlyfounded the integrated media design program fortheater at the University of Texas at Austin. Hisproductions have been seen at BAM, LincolnCenter, Seville Opera, Los Angeles Opera, CarnegieHall, Ohio Theatre, the Sundance Institute,Odyssey Theatre, Open Fist Theatre, Stella AdlerTheatre, A&E TV, HDTV, and Universal StudiosHollywood, and can currently be seen at theAbraham Lincoln Presidential Library, the TexasState History Museum, Universal StudiosSingapore, Lotte World, the Louisiana State CapitolMuseum, and elsewhere. Mr. Otte produced theCD-ROM game Monty Python and the Quest forthe Holy Grail. Select theater productions includeBulgakov’s Flight, This Is a Test, Travesties, The

Threepenny Opera, The Dead, Goose and Tomtom,La Belle et la Bête, and new plays by FrancisCowhig, Kimber Lee, Steven Haworth, RickPagano, Steven Dietz, and John Bishop. Mr. Ottehas worked on numerous productions assistingRobert Wilson, including The Knee Plays, TheGolden Windows, Monsters of Grace, and mostrecently as Directing Associate for the world tourof Einstein on the Beach. He is honored to beworking with the amazing artists involved withThe Old Woman. He plays the violin and is mar-ried to Christine Sang.

Lynsey Peisinger (assistant director) is a Paris-based choreographer and performer. She has castand trained performers for Marina Abramović inMoscow, Los Angeles, and Basel, and she helpsMs. Abramović coordinate and facilitate theAbramović Method. She has worked on The Lifeand Death of Marina Abramović and Zinnias: TheLife of Clementine Hunter, both directed byRobert Wilson, as prompter and assistant direc-tor respectively. She presented performanceworks at Mr. Wilson’s second Annual BerlinBenefit (2011), Hyeres Fashion and PhotographyFestival (2012), and Kunstfest Weimar (2012).She received her M.F.A. in choreography fromthe Dance Conservatory at Purchase College.

Tilman Hecker (dramaturg) was born inKarlsburg, Germany, in 1980 and studied archi-tecture and scenography in Berlin and Paris.During his studies he started working with RobertWilson and Achim Freyer as assistant director andcollaborator. His recent work with Mr. Wilson in-cludes The Odyssey at the National Theatre ofGreece and Lecture on Nothing at the RuhtriennaleFestival. Mr. Hecker made his directorial débutwith the Mozart opera project Mandy’s Baby atBerlin’s Radial System V in July 2009. His theaterdirecting credits include Narcissus and Echo by JaySchwartz (Salzburg State Theater and MusicadhoyFestival, Madrid), La Finta Giardiniera by Mozart(Wuppertal Opera), The Masque of Alfred byThomas Arne (Pocket Opera CompanyNuremberg), Songbooks by Cage (Berlin StateOpera Werkstatt), and The Secret Marriage byCimarosa (Nordhausen opera). In 2014, he di-rected a new work for the Tischlerei DeutscheOper Berlin, based on texts of Jean Genet com-posed by Birke Berteilsmeier.

PLAYBILL

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Jane Rosenbaum (stage manager) is a freelancestage manager who has worked with Mr. Wilsonon Snow on the Mesa, The Life and Death ofMarina Abramović, Einstein on the Beach, andZinnias: The Life of Clementine Hunter.Previously she served as production manager forthe Martha Graham Dance Company and IslandMoving Company. She received her M.F.A. intheater practice from the University of Exeter.

Reinhard Bichsel (technical director)’s collabo-rations with Robert Wilson include The KneePlays, “America” from The CIVIL warS, TheForest by Mr. Wilson and David Byrne,Persephone with music by Philip Glass, RelativeLights, Three Sisters at Stockholm City Theatre,Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, and Shakespeare’sSonnets, The Threepenny Opera, and Lulu withthe Berliner Ensemble. His production creditsalso include Sarafina by Mbongeni Ngema andMagic at 4am with Committed Artists of SouthAfrica. He also works steadily with Groupe F py-rotechnics and realizes shows worldwide.Additional credits include work for Vivace,Leichtsinn and Schwerkraft, Trillion DollarCompany Berlin, Tricodex by Philippe Decoufléat Festival La Fête, Bangkok, and technical su-pervision for Un Opera du Sahel, commissionedby the Prince Claus Fund, Holland.

COMMISSIONERS AND CO-PRODUCERS

Established in 1989, Change Performing Arts isan independent production company based inMilan, and active worldwide in the fields of liveperformance, including theater, dance, opera,traditional performing arts, and classical andcontemporary music, and in the visual arts, in-cluding installations, exhibitions, and culturalevents. Constantly devoting its efforts to creat-ing new relationships with established andyoung artists, the company explores and en-courages the way the various arts forms can becombined to create new and original means ofexpression in realizing provocative events of thehighest quality.

Baryshnikov Productions is designed to bringthe distinctive voices of innovative directors, cho-reographers, and artists to the world’s most wellrespected stages. Under this umbrella,Baryshnikov Productions has produced andtoured the White Oak Dance Project (1990–2002), Forbidden Christmas, or The Doctor and the Patient (2004–2006), Beckett Shorts(2007), In Paris (2010–2012), and Man in a Case(2013–2014).

Théâtre de la Ville-Paris is dedicated to the cul-tures of the world and its artistic achievementsin theater, dance, and music. Under the directionof Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota since 2008, it hasdeveloped a wide array of programs for youngpeople, conceived a new festival (Chantiersd’Europe) dedicated to young artists, created aninternational competition (Danse Élargie), andbuilt a network of local, national, and interna-tional partnerships. Its goal is to promote the ideaof a great popular theater in its multi-artistic andits international dimension—a great theater ofthe world.

The Spoleto Festival dei 2Mondi is an annualsummer music and opera festival held each Juneto early July in Spoleto, Italy, since its foundingby composer Gian Carlo Menotti in 1958. It fea-tures a vast array of concerts, opera, dance,drama, visual arts, and roundtable discussionson science. Recently revived by the new artisticdirector Giorgio Ferrara, the Spoleto Festival isthe most prominent Italian summer festival, pro-ducing and hosting international projects.

At deSingel International Arts Campus, deSingelAntwerp presents and produces theater, dance,music, and architecture, and make it available toa broad, art-loving public. As a contemporaryand internationally oriented arts campus,deSingel is concerned with permanent educationin the arts. Its large-scale infrastructure com-prises a medium-size concert hall (966 seats), alarge hall for theater and dance (803 seats), anexhibition space, a music studio (150 seats), anda theater studio (270 seats).