UBU — Robert Wilson’s Masterpiece Comes to Latvia for the First Time
On February 6–7 in Riga, one of the most anticipated theatrical events of the season will take place: the Hanzas Perons stage will host UBU, a production by the legendary American director Robert Wilson — a figure who has forever changed the language of contemporary theatre.
Robert Wilson is the man who created a new theatre. His aesthetics transformed the very notion of how the stage can be conceived: light became a partner to the actor, gesture became meaning, and silence — a line from which it is impossible to look away. He has collaborated with giants of the art world: Isabelle Huppert, Luc Besson, Marianne Faithfull, and Tilda Swinton have entrusted him with the most important thing — their inner facets that no one else could reveal.
On the opera stage, Wilson has created premieres with Jessye Norman, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, and Leslie Holt, and has directed productions at the Paris Opera, the Metropolitan Opera, La Scala, and the Salzburg Festival. His artistic signature is instantly recognizable: an exact sense of composition, an almost mathematical rhythm, and a visual minimalism in which every detail is decisive. Wilson has shaped the aesthetics of future generations of directors and has become a benchmark of theatrical boldness, proving that theatre can be as radical and innovative as contemporary visual art and architecture.
One of the most iconic productions of the modern era — Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach — belongs to Wilson, a work that became a turning point in the history of contemporary musical theatre.
A special place in his biography is occupied by Mikhail Baryshnikov. Their collaborations — from Letter to a Man to The Old Woman with Willem Dafoe — have achieved the status of cultural phenomena, giving the upcoming premiere in Riga a particular significance and symbolism.
UBU is a production inspired by Alfred Jarry’s revolutionary play Ubu Roi, which overturned theatrical conventions at the end of the 19th century, and by the visual legacy of Joan Miró, who repeatedly turned to the figure of Ubu in his famous grotesque creations. In Wilson’s staging, this artistic universe becomes a living scenic painting: puppets, surreal objects, deliberately grotesque figures — everything comes alive, laughs, frightens, and exposes.
This is a theatre of allegory, where the comic and the monstrous coexist. Here, power is an eternal carnival, cruelty — the reverse side of laughter, and the spectator — a witness to absurdity suddenly revealed as reality.
Thus, Wilson speaks of what cannot remain unspoken: tyranny, barbarism, and human nature itself — inclined toward cyclical and terrifying repetition.
“Complex, powerful, and brilliant.”
— El Diario
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