The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents
VIDEO 50 + DEAFMAN GLANCE
Robert Wilson
At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2026
Country
United States
Language
English
Running Time
85
minutes
Year of Release
1978 / 1981
About The Film
A double program of two essential early video works by Robert Wilson, screened together.
VIDEO 50 (1978, 52 min)
VIDEO 50 is an extraordinary video sketchbook — a highly original, visually dramatic, and frequently humorous collection of one hundred abbreviated episodes produced for television. Unfolding as an uninterrupted series of thirty-second vignettes, the work is characterized by deadpan theatricality, symbolist imagery, surrealist juxtapositions, and the repetition of key visual motifs. Indelible images, precisely composed — a man teetering above a waterfall, a floating chair, a winking eye, a parrot against the New York skyline — are accompanied by an architectural sound score that uses spoken phonetic patterns in place of recognizable words. Fusing his surprising visual logic and sense of temporal manipulation, Wilson creates a work of startling wit and poetry. The film anticipates both the aesthetics of music video and the rhythms of contemporary short-form visual media, while remaining entirely its own singular creation.
DEAFMAN GLANCE (1981, 27 min)
This haunting work for television has been excerpted and adapted from Wilson's five-hour silent opera of the same title, which premiered in Iowa City in 1970 and became an international sensation at its 1971 Paris run. The video tells a stark and stylized story of murder, using time and space, light and movement, and isolated sound in place of spoken words. A somber, menacing woman washes white dishes and a gleaming carving knife, pours milk into a glass, and then slowly attacks two young boys — not a word of dialogue uttered throughout. The ritualistic action moves from a spartan kitchen through the silent halls and stairways of a lonely house, existing in a space between ancient Greek tragedy and contemporary tabloid headline. Terrifying yet not violent, real yet symbolic, the work harbors deep paradox: pacing reduces action to abstraction; morality and mortality remain deliberately ambiguous.
Total running time: approximately 85 minutes.
Director / Artist: Robert Wilson
Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)
About The Artist(s)
Robert Wilson (October 4, 1941 – July 31, 2025) was an American director, playwright, and visual artist who fundamentally reshaped experimental theater over more than five decades. Born in Waco, Texas, he studied at the University of Texas before moving to New York, where he trained at Brooklyn's Pratt Institute and founded the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, a performance collective that became the incubator for his early landmark works.
Wilson's theater — often described as a "theater of imagery" — is distinguished by its radical reimagining of theatrical time and space, its use of exquisitely composed light and movement in place of conventional narrative, and its synthesis of visual art, music, dance, and text into unified stage pictures. His work sits at a radical distance from naturalism: performers move with ritualized, slow precision, language is treated as sound as much as meaning, and the stage itself functions as a living painting.
His breakthrough came with Deafman Glance (1970), a six-hour silent opera that electrified Paris audiences and prompted the Surrealist poet Louis Aragon to describe Wilson as the fulfillment of Surrealism's deepest aspirations. Throughout the 1970s Wilson created a series of epic-scale works that redefined theatrical duration, culminating in his collaboration with composer Philip Glass on Einstein on the Beach (1976), a five-hour opera that premiered at the Avignon Festival and later played the Metropolitan Opera. It is widely regarded as one of the defining works of 20th-century performance.
Over the following decades Wilson collaborated with an extraordinary range of artists — Tom Waits, William S. Burroughs, Heiner Müller, Lou Reed, Susan Sontag, Laurie Anderson, Willem Dafoe, and Marina Abramovic, among many others — while also directing canonical texts by Shakespeare, Beckett, Wagner, Ibsen, and Ionesco. He staged productions at the world's leading theaters and opera houses, including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Berliner Ensemble, the Thalia Theater Hamburg, La Scala, and the Salzburg Festival.
Alongside his theater work, Wilson was a prolific maker of video art. Beginning in 1978 he produced a series of innovative television works including VIDEO 50, DEAFMAN GLANCE, and STATIONS, transposing his theatrical visual language into the moving image. He also created an extensive series of Video Portraits of figures including Lady Gaga, Brad Pitt, and Mikhail Baryshnikov.
In 1991 Wilson founded The Watermill Center on Long Island, a "laboratory for performance" housed in a former Western Union research facility on the edge of the Shinnecock Reservation, which continues to host residencies, exhibitions, and productions. His drawings, sculptures, and installations are held in major collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, the Whitney Museum, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Wilson received numerous honors throughout his life, including Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, the Drama Desk Award, Obie Awards, and a 1986 Pulitzer Prize nomination. He died on July 31, 2025, at the age of 83.
Get in touch with the artist(s)