I WAS SITTING ON MY PATIO THIS GUY APPEARED I THOUGHT I WAS HALLUCINATING / ALMADA FESTIVAL

Francesco Chiaro in Persinsala 18 Julho 2022 | notícia online

Most known for his trailblazing works in experimental theatre, Robert Wilson brings back up one of his seminal and non-canonical pieces -now enriched by a renewed cast- in an attempt to remind us that the mirror he had held up to nature back in 1977 is still very relevant today, and it is showing a humanity lost in its own onanistic self-indulgence.

Forty-five years after the creation of I was sitting on my patio this guy appeared I thought I was hallucinating, Robert Wilson and Lucinda Childs bequeath to two new performers – German actor Christopher Nell and Australian dancer Julie Shanahan – their roles in this geminated monologue. Created by Robert Wilson in 1977, a year after the creation of Einstein on the Beach and its well-marked energy, this monologue deprived of action gives rise to a stream of irrational association of ideas, set in the simplicity of a black and white stage and driven by movements initially angular then feverish.

«A frenzy of words, originally interpreted by Robert Wilson himself in an impressive rapture, was taken up in the same tune by Lucinda Childs, who gave it the expressiveness of an inner collapse. Clinical minimalism, formal austerity perceived through contradictions. Nothing materializes, not even this “guy” announced in the title and in the first words of the text. Nothing happens and everything happens. Everything happens time and again, in individual difference. And it will continue to happen, going round and round like a roundabout».

Aware that he himself (along with many others artists of his generation, particularly active and innovative in 1960s’ and 1970s’ New York) had opened up new doors and stirred up the codes of representation, Wilson was afraid that, with the passing of time, his works would become a sum of codes as strict as those of the previous generation, dreading that his experimentation -in which he refuses to frontally approach the audience, to commit deeply with reality and to sacralise his characters- would end up being yet another set of imposed codes. These fears of his, however, were quickly set aside by the passing of time, and of baton: thanks to the awe-inspiring performances of Nell and Shanahan, I was sitting on my patio… still proves to be an exquisite piece of theatre capable of charting the disintegration of structured drama all the while giving an extreme degree of freedom to those who enact it.

Indeed, through a lattice of mysterious thoughts that open up a series of fleeting windows to disturbing yet familiar worlds, Wilson’s double solo is still pregnant with meaning even in its unorthodox and seldomly linear narration, «leaving scope for the audience to live out its own daydream» and to be fished out by whatever magnetic word that catches its subconscious self. In an ever more distracted society, where briefness has become a cage rather than a quality, Nell and Shanahan’s lengthy yet fragmented histrionic feat takes on a new sense, holding up an hallucinated mirror to reality and getting lost in its mad race towards self-annihilation.

The show was played at
Teatro Nacional D. Maria II – Sala Garrett
Praça Dom Pedro IV – Lisbon
Saturday 16, 2022 at 21:30
Sunday 17, 2022 at 17:00

the Almada Festival presents
I was sitting on my patio this guy appeared I thought I was hallucinating
by Robert Wilson

author and director Robert Wilson
co-director Lucina Childs
cast Christopher Nell and Julie Shanahan
associated director Charles Chemin
costumes Carlos Soto
set design collaborator Annick Lavallée-Benny
light design collaborator Marcello Lumaca
sound design Nick Sagar
make-up artist Manuela Halligan
make-up artist collaborator Véronique Pflüger
costumes assistant Emeric Le Bourhis
set design assistant Chloé Bellemère
associated director assistant Agathe Vidal
produced by Théâtre de la Ville
in association with EdM Productions
co-presented by Teatro Nacional D. Maria II