Listening to Deafman Glance

Multisensorial Listening and d/Deafness in the Silent Opera, 

Television Production and Gallery Video Installation

Deafman Glance began as the result of Robert Wilson’s chance encounter with thirteen-year-old Raymond Andrews during a moment of impending violence at the hands of New Jersey police. Wilson’s recounting of their meeting tells the story of his rescuing Andrews, a young, deaf, black child. The forging of a relationship between Andrews and Wilson—an adult, white male—in the face of police brutality does not remain unnoted. In Absolute Wilson, a documentary-style portrait of the director, Wilson recalls of the event, “I was walking down the street, and I saw a policeman about to hit this child over the head with a club. I stopped the policeman and said, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’ He said, ‘It’s none of your business.’ I said, ‘But it is . . . it is. I’m a responsible citizen.’” (1) Wilson continues to recall that he first noticed Andrews’s deafness through “…sounds coming from him. I recognized them as the sounds of a deaf person.” (2) This recognition of Andrews’s voice—“the sounds of a deaf person”—arises as Wilson’s first inspiration for the silent opera.

Wilson eventually became Andrews’s legal guardian to prevent him from being placed in institutional care and, over the course of many years, developed a close personal, creative, and working relationship with him. In a 1970 interview, Wilson described his communication with Andrews stating, "[H]e’s so amazing to me, his paintings, his drawings are so amazing to me—cause he doesn’t talk, he’s never been to school, he doesn’t hear sound he hasn’t learned to read lips—he—so his way of communicating is a whole other way.” (3) This “whole other way” of communicating with Andrews, which Wilson speaks of, makes accounting for Andrews’s agency within this creative, working relationship increasingly difficult. Aside from photographs and archival letters between Andrews and Wilson, there are few indicators of Andrews’s involvement in the creative process. Wilson notes that Deafman Glance came as a direct result of Andrews’s drawings and means of communication. Wilson states, “You know, because it’s almost like, it’s his material [Deafman Glance] almost—to me—I’m helping him—arrange.” (4)

In an effort to restore Raymond Andrews’s creative voice within this production and credit him in the development of Wilson’s celebrated use of movement and sound, I make the small, overdue gesture of referring to the production as Andrews and Wilson’s Deafman Glance. By restoring Andrews’s authorship to the production (which Wilson continually reinforces in interviews, yet publications constantly undo through naming the production solely as “Wilson’s”), Andrews’s multisensorial voice—as mediated through sound, gesture, and vision—can be more clearly heard. Andrews and Wilson’s various versions of Deafman Glance—the 1970 silent opera, the 1981 televised production, and various video installation exhibitions—demonstrate how performance mediality and direction shift audience perception of Andrews’s experience of d/Deafness.

Situating Deafman Glance’s History within a Critical Disabilities Studies Framework

In contemporary performance studies and musicology, discussions about difference have generally referred to the representation of more commonly visited categories of gender and race. While the role of disability has seen less critical attention, discussions of disability in the field of musicology reflect a vibrant and growing subdiscipline. Critical disabilities studies has emerged as a field of cultural analysis within the humanities. More recently, the social model of disability, advocated in politics by the disability rights movement and in scholarship by disability studies, has argued for the importance of bodily difference. Under this model, disability is not a fixed, medical condition; rather, it emerges from a society that chooses to accommodate some bodies and exclude others. Attention to d/Deaf studies within music, sound, and performance studies is crucial in forming an accessible and inclusive understanding of hearing and, by extension, listening. Moving away from the assumption that auditory hearing is paramount to musical experience can offer interpretations of sound that allow for a diverse set of experiences within the full spectrum of listening. This research on Deafman Glance has been shaped by an arena of disabilities studies that has begun offering inclusive interpretations of listening through an understanding of multisensory listening practices. (5) These practices attend to an understanding of sound informed by listening, feeling, seeing, touching, and resonating.

Several performances of Deafman Glance are crucial in considering the work’s history. The 1970 work in Iowa City was initially performed by Raymond Andrews, Robert Wilson, Sheryl Sutton, and The Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds. This production would later be reimagined as the prologue, or overture, to Deafman Glance focusing entirely on the “murder scene.” A televised production of Deafman Glance was produced in 1981. The televised production would later be reimagined as a video installation experience as part of the touring exhibition Robert Wilson’s Vision in 1991 and as a solo exhibition at the Paula Cooper Gallery in 1993 and 2010. The initial theatre productions of the 1970s notably came during a period where the arts were increasingly tied to notions of “identity politics.” (6) Women artists, artists of color, LGBTQ+ artists, disabled artists, and artists of decentered identities created ways to present their life experiences, interrogate social perception of their identities, and critique systemic issues that marginalized them in society. “Identity politics” gained traction in the United States in the 1970s and the 1980s to designate art that addressed issues of identity—including race, gender, sexuality, and disability. 

At the same historical moment, disability rights activists of the 1970s in the United Sates lobbied Congress and marched on Washington to include civil rights language for people with disabilities in the 1972 Rehabilitation Act. In 1973, the Rehabilitation Act was passed, and for the first time in history, civil rights of people with disabilities were protected by law. (7) Just prior to this moment, the 1960s saw an increase in disability advocates joining minority groups to demand equal treatment, equal access, and equal opportunity for people with disabilities. The civil rights movement of the 1960s used marches, sit-ins, and protests as tools for change, and inspired many minority groups, including the d/Deaf community, to press for greater self-determination and economic opportunity. (8) The fact that these interventions occurred at the same historical moment as Andrews and Wilson’s Deafman Glance serves to highlight the production’s distinction as a work directly tied to the “identity politics” artistic movement and underscores the production’s investment in providing an accessible, multisensorial interpretation of sound.

Andrews, as both co-creator and lead of the production, literally enmeshes his own perception of the world through his performance. Stefan Brecht writes, “The one and only individual in this show, almost the protagonist, is the fictitious character created by Raymond Andrews.” (9) The entire production exists only through Andrews’s own performance and perception. Wilson, as co-creator of the work, similarly incorporates his own experience and chooses to feature his own “intrusive voice” at points of the production. (10) Wilson’s stuttering growing up, while called into question, (11) largely influenced and continues to influence his work. He credits work with Byrd Hoffman, a teacher who taught expression through dance, in helping him develop his verbal expression. Wilson notes,

Byrd Hoffman was in her seventies when I first met her. She taught me dance and she understood the body in a remarkable way. She talked to me about the energy in my body. About relaxing. About letting my energy flow through. She was amazing because she never taught a technique. She never gave me a way to approach it. It was more that she helped me to discover my body and dance on my own. (12)

Hoffman’s influence on Wilson’s life was eventually credited in 1968 when Wilson founded the experimental performance company the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds in honor of his teacher. (13) The company performed Deafman Glance and worked with local groups of individuals with disabilities coordinating movement workshops. These workshops explored and developed movement exercises that showed the effect that physical stimulation could have on the brain. (14) This movement-based work, which engendered sensitivity to how movement could be used to cross between various perceptual modalities, especially where the use of language was not sufficient, influenced Wilson’s emphasis on the use of movement, gesture, and sound to communicate alternative frames of mind in his theatrical works. Disability importantly lies at the core of Deafman Glance and allows for the creation of an alternative mode of theatrical expression and practices of listening.

Listening to the Silent Opera

Deafman Glance, the silent opera, was first performed as a workshop production at the University of Iowa in 1970. Subsequent performances in 1971 included an appearance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City, the Grand Théatre de Nancy at Festival Mondial in France, Teatro Eliseo in Rome, the Théatre de la Musique in Paris, and the Stadsschouwburg Theater at the Holland Festival in Amsterdam. The various productions are noted to have run anywhere from four to seven hours in length. Limited accounts of the performances show glimpses into theatrical productions of Deafman Glance. Noting that each performance was distinctly different, however, makes providing a general overview of Deafman Glance difficult. Available video recording footage of the 1970 Iowa performance provided by the Robert A. Wilson Collection in the Theatre on Film and Tape Archive at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and Stefan Brecht’s account of the February 25, 1971 performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music together provide a cohesive construction of the production. Noteworthy to mention, however, is that while there was music, sound, and occasional dialogue incorporated within the production, available video footage of the 1970 Iowa performance does not feature sound. This perhaps stands to highlight that Andrews and Wilson’s vision for the production was in no way dependent on auditory sound. Rather, the listening portion of the production was intended to be experienced through multisensorial interpretation—as mediated primarily through gesture and vision. 

The production opens with a prologue, also called the overture, which is often referred to as a the “murder scene.” (Figure 1) This scene, which Wilson claims he never quite understood, becomes the basis for both the televised and installation adaptations of Deafman Glance. Within this scene, a killing is carried out two times. A tall woman, played by Sheryl Sutton, wearing a dark Victorian dress pours a glass of milk and gives it to a small child who is sitting in a chair with his back to the audience. The child slurps the milk. Sutton turns away, goes back to the table where she picks up a knife, wipes it off, goes over to the body and stabs him. The boy dies and falls from his chair. Sutton then repeats the action with a young child sleeping on the ground downstage left. Notably, both killings enacted by Sutton are witnessed by a young boy played by Andrews who is wearing a bowler hat. In some versions, it is noted that Andrews screams. The rest of the production consists of three core, slow-moving scenes.

One scene, which sometimes occurs prior to the prologue, takes place at the seashore where a series of images emerge and disperse including Sutton and a raven posed motionless, a turtle, and “a dancing mistress who counts 1-2-3, seemingly endlessly.” (15) An angel later appears, after which the stage fills with characters performing a swing dance. (16) Runners and a slow-moving turtle continuously cross the stage.

Another scene, which also occurs prior to the prologue in some productions, takes place in a Victorian world. Bradley Winterton writes of this scene, “Shaded, heavy mauve. Entries, confrontations, stares, silences. A huge silence surrounds everything. A poem of the past imperfect.” (17) The third scene, which is documented well in both Brecht’s account and the surviving video recordings, features a dream-like world in which Andrews is always present. The stage, which largely resembles a forest, provides the backdrop for several surrealist situations. A large frog presides at a banquet table where members continuously join at stage right. An individual who is fishing also sits at the base of this table. Just behind the table, a cottage-like structure with a decorative palm tree, that grows and shrinks throughout the performance, is positioned. At stage left, turtles become the basis of a structure, which is continuously built upon throughout the performance. Andrews sits on a bench just beyond this structure for the majority of the scene. The background consists of a forest scene with a mountain just in the distance. Throughout all of these scenes, a chair is suspended from the sky, rising and falling very slowly.

The general plot of this scene is remarkably slow moving with very little, highly intentional movement. A number of figures enter the scene, perform actions, and leave. Two small turtles move across stage and a giant frog wearing a suit sits at a table. Two individuals serve the frog a martini. Another individual enters stage left carrying planks of wood. Two additional turtles join the stage. More individuals move across stage carrying planks of wood. These planks of wood are placed around the turtles and a structure begins to form. More individuals join the stage, some sitting at the banquet table. Wilson appears on stage and sits down at the banquet table. Brecht writes, “in a normal voice, though with many odd pauses and in a slightly puzzled manner, [Wilson] relates a rare, perhaps occult, obscurely very relevant experience into the mike on the table, reading from some papers he has pulled out from inside his jacket.” (18) This moment constitutes one of the only appearances of dialogue in the production and features Wilson’s own “intrusive voice.” (19) Smoke begins to emanate from the cottage. Many individuals pass by and around Andrews, who has been sitting stage left, with his head bowed down and forward since the beginning of this scene. Individuals carrying panes of glass form various positions around Andrews. More individuals carrying babies cross through the stage. Andrews finally raises his head and begins conversing through movement with a dancing woman. Andrews, still sitting on the bench, moves right of center stage, almost as if by magic. Individuals interact with Andrews. They perform ritualistic actions on the boy, and eventually Andrews’s bowler hat is removed and a pointed crown is placed upon his head. Andrews ascends into the air as he watches an ox down below. A paper moon falls from the sky and a figure below crumples it feeding it to the ox. The ox is later beheaded. Notably, this ox frequently appeared in Andrews’s drawings. Wilson states, “He’s [Andrews’s] very involved with an ox, for some reason. It’s almost like—he’s drawn an ox, and something about this image that keeps coming back, he almost for-for a time, he almost used it like a signature, he almost signed things with an ox—it’s like other things were happening, with this ox, and people or characters or other things, but somehow always the ox was there”. (20) Additional individuals and animals enter and leave the stage. The props and scenery begin to dissipate until the stage is nearly empty. Andrews lowers to the ground from the sky. (Figure 2) A crowd of figures emerge on stage and Andrews looks around just before leaving. Finally, apes flood the stage. These animals play with apples and one begins playing the harp, though no sound is heard. Sutton again enters the stage watching the ape play the instrument. Snow falls and the curtain closes.

The plot of this production while slow moving and intentionally disorienting at times is nonetheless important to follow. The prologue sets the tone for the production and introduces themes that carry throughout Deafman Glance. Themes of death and birth in addition to murder and motherhood run throughout the production, however, only in the prologue are these themes directly addressed. The choice to cast Sutton and Andrews purposefully incorporates black identity into late twentieth-century America’s primarily white avant-garde theatre. The prologue stresses the mother’s maternal solitude for her victims as well as for the survivor, Andrews. Performing as a Medea-like character, Sutton subverts the stereotype of the black woman as a domestic “mammy” figure. (21) While Sutton’s performance has received criticism, particularly in the 1981 televised version, Sutton importantly does not view her part in this production as one where the black woman enacts a stereotypically violent act. The murder scene may serve to represent a subversive act which kills the stereotypical representation of black women. This idea is further reflected upon within the context of the 1981 televised production. 

The slow-moving plot, punctuated by silence and highly intentional gesture, arises as a rumination on the themes foregrounded in the prologue and as a meditation on the multisensorial experience of hearing. Through the intersection of hearing and deafness in Deafman Glance, visual and acoustic registers operate in tandem with each other and address, without providing answers, the crisis in speaking and the apparent absence of voice. Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren notes that the multisensorial listening presented in Deafman Glance can be read as the “surreality of the ‘hearing eye,’” which Julia Kristeva writes of. (22) Kristeva writes that the Surrealists failed in their efforts to create a communal theatre of play because they were unable to reconstitute the sacred within the field of theatre. Furthermore, Kristeva argues that through experimentation with gesture, sound, color, and non-verbal sign systems the supremacy of symbolic order can be challenged. (23) This challenging of symbolic order through a manipulation of listening as a visual-spatial experience in Deafman Glance is perhaps why Surrealist artist Louis Aragon, fifty years after the Surrealist movement’s moment had passed, praised Deafman Glance as “an extraordinary freedom machine.” (24)

Aragon wrote, “Bob Wilson is, would be, will be [the future tense would have been necessary] surrealist through silence, although one could also say it of all painters, but Wilson—it’s the wedding of gesture and silence, of movement and the ineffable.” (25) The surrealist aesthetic, which is accomplished in Aragon’s opinion through the pairing of silence and movement, is in fact a direct result of the d/Deaf experience of listening. Andrews and Wilson’s intentional use of gesture throughout the performance presents Andrews’s experience with sound. Wilson recalls learning from Andrews that listening has to do with the connection of sound and the body. The vibrational quality of sound largely influences Andrews’s mode of perceiving. In sound studies, scholars including Nina Eidsheim have offered a vibrational theory of music that re-envisions the ways in which we think about sound, music, and listening. This focus on the physical, vibrational nature of sound opens space for sensing otherwise. Nina Eidsheim writes, “approaching music as a vibrational practice offers much more: it recognizes, and hence encourages, idiosyncratic experiences of and with music.” (26) I claim that the material qualities of this approach to listening are made evident in the visual, highly gestural character of Deafman Glance.

This visual and gestural experience becomes the lens through which audience members perceive the silent opera. Where auditory sound once stood in the traditional opera experience, visuals now construct an aural image for the audience of Deafman Glance. This rift in the traditional experience of theatre and opera produces a shift in audience perception enabling viewers to listen otherwise. Whether audience members pay attention, what they pay attention to and, furthermore, what kind of attention they pay—as mediated through the visual and sonic—are entirely dependent. Audience members must adapt to the theatrical presentation and orient themselves, choosing to determine how and what they make of the performance.

While Deafman Glance is lauded for its “wedding of gesture and silence,” noting sound’s presence in the original theatre production remains important. (27) Andrews and Wilson’s productions were not entirely “silent” by the standard definition. Stefan Brecht’s account of the 1971 Brooklyn Academy of Music performance notes inclusion of voice, sound, and music. In terms of voice, an “almost neuter scream, emotionally colorless jabs at utterance, not too loud,” (28) Robert Wilson’s “normal voice, though with many odd pauses and in a slightly puzzled manner,” (29) a “Slavic accented” voice (30), and “remarks overheard as if not intended for us” (31) are featured at various points throughout the silent opera. Musically, the production incorporates a “hum of music, humming,” (32) an “ominous sequence of piano chords,” (33) “the fateful piano tickle” (34) that apparently accompanies the entrance of Andrews on stage, “the magician’s chords,” (36) “the brash music of a pop tune (Mutual Admiration Society) blaring out,” “organ music,” (37) “gongs and bells . . . That shivery, eerie music is at its height,” (38) “Fauré’s Requiem” played at the moment of the ox’s death, (39) “the soprano aria,” (40) “a lugubrious music,” (41) and “the sounds of “When you’re in love, it’s the loveliest time of the year” from the accordion, a waltz.” (42) Additional sounds throughout the production include repeated “forest noises,” (43) “the thin sound of the ice cubes in the shaker,” (44) repeated “sounds of ocean waves,” (45) and a “hammer blowing sound from afar as though his carpentry were unreal.” (46)

The voices, music, and sounds throughout this production all notably serve various functions but do not arise as the primary means of plot comprehension throughout the production. Voices do not share important plot information or dialogue, but they rather showcase the intrusive nature of language. Music seemingly serves no greater function than to signal what the visuals of the production are already pronouncing. Sounds, furthermore, set the scene which is already visually present. The silent opera is mediated through a visual listening style. This is, perhaps, why Andrews and Wilson’s archival record of Deafman Glance erases the sonic portion of the work’s documentation. The visual listening presented in Deafman Glance offers audience members a glance into Andrews’s perspective of the world and becomes the guiding concept of both the televised and installation adaptations of the work.

Watching Television

In 1981, the murder-scene of Deafman Glance was excerpted and adapted to become a twenty-seven-minute-long work for television. (Figure 3) Produced by the Byrd Hoffman Foundation, Sutton again stars with Jerry Jackson and Rafael Carmona playing the two children. Interestingly, Andrews does not appear in this work,yet remains central to the its visual listening style. The televised Deafman Glance contains a nearly identical plot to the silent opera’s prologue. Sutton moves from the kitchen throughout various spaces in a home, murdering two children along the way. Similar to the silent opera, Sutton’s performance works to subvert the stereotype of the black woman as a domestic “mammy” figure. (47) The noticeable lack of remorse and almost-emotionless murders are emphasized through intense repetition, focused shots, and intensified sound. Not a word of dialogue is uttered, and this silence suggests Sutton’s rejection of her role as mother figure. The performance is filled with paradoxes: the events are terrifying but not violent, characters are both real and symbols of reality, pacing reduces action to abstraction, and morality and mortality are ambiguous. Within this dreamscape, scene, gesture, vision, and sound collide to become a reflection on and refraction of a dark American history interlaced with racism and prejudice. Sutton’s performance, as mediated through the camera lens, becomes an undoing of stereotypes created through the white gaze of the late-twentieth-century avant-garde cast upon her and her character.

Despite the performance’s intent, however, critics reacted negatively regarding Sutton’s performance. Amy Taubin questioned, “What does it then mean to present without any critical context a black woman as a totally omnipotent figurer, with complete power over life and death?” (48) Furthermore, others negatively critiqued the work’s depiction of a black woman enacting a stereotypically violent scene. The implications of race within Deafman Glance demands further research, and points to the work’s relationship to the “identity politics” movement of 1970s. 

Despite the consistency in plot to the prologue of the theatre production, the televised mediality of the performance has distinct implications for viewers. The New York Times “Television Week” reads the following:

There will be sound but no dialogue in ‘Deafman Glance,’ which will be this week’s presentation on the “Matters of Life and Death” series Sunday at 11 P.M. on Channel 13. Described as “a gothic video-drama,” the half-hour work uses sound effects, as well as time and space, light and movement, in lieu of spoken words to recount a stylized tale of murder. (49)

The televised adaptation of Andrews and Wilson’s silent opera harnesses the medium of video to amplify division, difference and multiplication within the experience of multisensorial listening. By segmenting, narrowing in, further stylizing, and more directly navigating viewers’ experiences, the televised production becomes Wilson’s first aestheticized interpretation of Andrews’s experience. The theatre performance of Deafman Glance provided the ground for Wilson’s interrogation of video, even as the televised production worked to challenge and extend the terms of the live work. In these ways, Wilson’s televised production is bound to the terms of performance, which the work has developed through radical steps into and out of these media.

Samuel Weber argues that television’s operation confuses the relationship between representation and its object. In bringing events “closer,” television sets before the viewer not simply the reproduction of the distant object but a mode of perception. (50) In this operation, Weber proposes that television “transports visions as such and sets it immediately before the viewer. It entails not merely a heightening of the naturally limited powers of sight with respect to certain distant objects: it involves a transmission or transposition of vision itself.” (51)

This “transposition of vision” is evident in the planning of the television production. Pre-production storyboards from the Watermill Center Archive are timestamped and carefully illustrate each still of the production highlighting the highly visual listening style of the production. In fact, only one initial sound—that of running water—is indicated in the storyboard. (Figure 4) The opening moments of the piece orient audience members to a stylized, very intentional viewpoint. Intensified sounds of birds chirping and running sink water open the performance with a close shot of Sutton’s back to the viewer as she presumably looks out of a window. The camera momentarily follows her line of gaze but redirects down to her hand which slowly and carefully turns off the sink. She continues washing and drying dishes with the sounds of the cloth wiping each plate noticeably intensified. Here, each action performed by Sutton is matched with an intensified sound of the task literally at hand. The gestural, visual, and sonic collide into one creating a close-up and sonically amplified view for viewers.

In a 1970 interview, Wilson speaks of Andrews’s experience hearing. He refers to this mode of listening as “seeing-hearing” noting, 

He [Andrews] developed another sense of seeing-hearing that, that’s very amazing—his association with color or light with people is—just amazing, amazing—and he always, if he wants to—if he wants to tell me about someone he doesn’t know how to write their name or spell their name he can draw some symbol or some meaning, that you know who that person is or what it is. (52)

Through video and post-production processing, the multisensorial, “seeing-hearing” experience is edited and reimagined by Wilson. The viewer’s gaze nearly becomes the tactile experience of Sutton’s actions. Listening, feeling, seeing, touching, and resonating coalesce in Wilson’s stylized interpretation of the multisensory listening experience.

The televised production continues to explore this seeing-hearing relationship with the opening of the fridge, pouring of milk, pacing throughout the space, reading of pages, drinking of milk, and killings. The murderous act is repeated twice with amplified sounds and close-up shots. Only with Sutton’s stabbing of each child can non-diegetic, foreboding cello music be heard. Existing outside of the television production’s visual landscape, these musical moments create an alternative space where hearing beyond gestural, object-relationality is possible. Sound within the televised production is closely linked to the visual except in the musical, ineffable moments of murder.

Viewing the Gallery

The televised production would later be reimagined as a video installation in several gallery spaces. Within the context of the exhibition Robert Wilson’s Vision, Deafman Glance became a portion of a video installation. (Figure 5) The show was organized as a traveling tour, first opening in Boston and thereafter Houston and San Francisco. The Epilogue: Video Room featured five video works that Wilson created since 1978, including Deafman Glance. The space featured several monitors each paired with nearly seven-foot tall, white Wilson-chairs. Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston writes of the chairs that “Wilson designed [these] as surrogate viewers.” (53) These chairs remarkably resemble magnified versions of the hanging chair Andrews sits in throughout the silent opera. Visitors of the gallery are placed within a noticeably uncomfortable space forced to either gaze from behind the large, looming chairs or strain their necks as they wedge in front of the chairs to view the screens. The chairs, which serve as surrogate viewers, block and nearly physically disable gallery visitors. As viewers struggle to navigate the space and overcome obstacles, the videos play on loop creating an overlay of sound for visitors.

Notably, the entrance and three additional rooms of the exhibition were designed with an accompanying sound environment by sound artist, Hans Peter Kuhn. While the rest of the exhibition featured a sound environment, the five video projects were placed separately as an Epilogue. To prevent their soundtracks from undermining Kuhn’s sound environments, and their televised images from interfering with the free flow of visitors through the spaces, the videos were shown separately. This intentionally created a multilayered video-sound installation separate from the larger exhibition.

In 1993 and again in 2010, a solo video installation of Deafman Glance was exhibited at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York City. (Figure 6) Similar to the Epilogue: Video Room in Robert Wilson’s Vision, the exhibition again featured monitors paired with elongated chairs, only this time Deafman Glance was exclusively played on all monitors. In 1993, New York Times’s Charles Hagen noted, perhaps not in the best terms, “These constructions suggest dunces’ chairs, for slow learners to sit in while they struggle to understand the dark deeds portrayed in the tape.” (54) Whether interpreted as figures of disability, surrogate viewers, or performers in their own right, the chairs alter viewers’ physical encounter with and perception of the work. Here, a complex experience of encountering the art object, the space, and the viewers’ own body is carefully at play.

Notably in the installation, the videos play on the six monitors at a three-second delay causing not only an undulation of images, but also a rippling, overlay of sound. The placement of the six monitors operating at various playback times in a single installation serves to amplify the “vibrational acoustic” that video artist Bill Viola has suggested marks the “real-time” operation of the video technology. Viola notes, “All video has its roots in the live. This vibrational acoustic character of video as a virtual image is the essence of its ‘liveness.’ Technologically, video has evolved out of sound.”(55) In Viola’s view, video is an intrinsically multisensorial media. In addition to temporal manipulation, sound is aesthetically manipulated yet again through looped layering further reinforcing sound’s secondary importance to gesture and vision in the exhibition. Once again Wilson creates a space in which the audience is forced to choose where and how they focus their attention. Listening, feeling, seeing, touching, and resonating all became possible modes of interacting with the space, however, a certain discomfort remains hyper-present. Staging the gallery space as inaccessible and overstimulating can be viewed as Wilson’s reflection on the experience of disability.

The Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston writes of the video installation:

Wilson claims that he has never understood the murder scene from ‘Deafman Glance,’ which may explain why he returns to it as he does. It is the clearest example of an involvement with relativity in his art. He insists that meaning depends on so many factors that it [is] pointless to ascribe single interpretation—however obvious it might seem—to a given work of art. Things are perceived differently depending upon the time, space, and frame or context in which they are presented. One intention of all Wilson’s art is to stretch our awareness of these conditions: he wants to teach us to listen with our whole bodies, as a deaf person must, and not only with our ears; and to see with a similarly expanded sensibility. (56)

Each iteration of Deafman Glance explores Andrews’s multisensory experiences of sound as a d/Deaf individual. Visuals construct an aural image for the audience of the staged production, unlike in traditional experiences of theatre and opera. Wilson’s critical move produces a shift in audience perception enabling viewers to experience a multisensorial interpretation of listening. Gestural expression and visual cues become the means by which audience members hear Andrews’s perspective as shared through Deafman Glance. Furthermore, adaptations of the initial silent opera, in the form of a televised production and gallery installation video exhibition, continue to explore the multisensory experiences of sound that characterized the staged production. In each re-mediatization of Deafman Glance, alternative modes of listening and sensing are explored as Wilson’s curation pushes viewers to “listen with their whole bodies.”