Einstein on the Beach It is not about finding meaning, but simply aboutto being meaningful.

The grand production of Einstein on the Beach took its place on stage in 1976 with a windswept vision and exhilarating collaboration of art to change the image of opera forever. Composed by Philip Glass and directed by Robert Wilson, this piece brought together a full-scale production of singers, dancers, lights, music, and quality sets. Interestingly enough, when Glass and Wilson first met to discuss a collaborative work, they threw around ideas of Charlie Chaplin, Adolf Hitler, and Mahatma Gandhi, andbut they eventually compromised and to a focused on Albert Einstein. Einstein was to be portrayed as a purely historical figure, involving absolutely no storyline or plot within the work. Even without any storyline, the piece still incorporated symbols from Einsteins life within the lighting, sets, music, and costuming. One such example is the use of numerical repetition,; perhaps referring to scientific and mathematic breakthroughs from Einstein himself. Wilson had comparesd Einsteins functioning to schizophrenia: the splitting of the atom and the splitting of the mind. This is certainly one clue to the function of the piece: the unrelatables, the transmutations (Kostelanetz). The trial in Einstein is an example of Wilsons ability to create images that lack specific meaning yet fill the mind and imagination. (Shyer). One of the biggest feats of this work is the huge amount of collaboration that it required. From the very beginning of the creativeon process, Wilson and Glass worked with each other and created the piece together. In fact, Wilsons drawings were the genesis of Einstein on the Beach; the rest of the production music, text, staging was built around them (Holmberg). Rather than simply creating music for a pre-choreographed dramatic piece, the music was written for the drawings.; tThe drawings were revised,; the music was changed,; and this cycle continuedon and on until a final version was closer to completion. The hugely
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collaborated production of Einstein on the Beach created an opera revolutionary to its time. It was not an opera because of the singers, but because of the larger, truer sense of opera as a mixed-media theatrical piece with prominent music. (Wilson). This theatrical piece became a full-fledged, five- hours- long piece without an intermission; the audience was free to enter and exit as desired. It consists of three main scenes Train,, Trial,, and Field/Spaceship. Dividing each of these acts, as well as preceding and following them, are Knee Plays. The Knee Play serves as an interlude between acts and refers to the joining function of the anatomical knee. David Cunningham, a Glass scholar, wrote that the Knee Plays serve as a constant motif in the whole work.. The music is a circular process; a repeating cycle that constantly delays resolution. Along with the unique musical contribution from Glass, Wilson added his own personal touch to the piece. He organized the work in spatial terms borrowed from the traditions of painting and cinema (Holmberg). All of the scenes are relative to three positions: foreground, middle, and rear; or as Wilson would say, portrait,, still life,, and landscape.. Primary characters: Lucinda Childs, Sheryl S. Sutton, and Samuel M. Johnson. After the original 1976 performances, there have been small revivals of the work; the Brooklyn Academy of Music documented Einstein on the Beach on public television in 1984, and later, the Princeton University restaged a production in 1992 thatwhich toured to Frankfurt, Melbourne, Barcelona, Madrid, Tokyo, Brooklyn, and Paris. It wasnt until twenty20 years after the Princeton production that the work was revived again. Under the direction of Glass, Wilson, and Childs, Einstein on the Beach was re-created in 2012 and toured all across the world. With this latest revival of the work came quite a fair amount of new critiques and analyseis on the piece. Many critics have compared this revival to the original 1976 version of

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Comment [T3]: Is this your thesis? It has a good start, but you could give a little more detail about the effect it had on opera. Let your audience know where you are going so that we know what to focus on as we continue to read.

Comment [T4]: I assumed youll write more with this later?

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the work,; displaying aspects that help us to further understand what the original piece was like. An article in Dance Magazine statesd that the dancing has become less eccentric than the original work. Wendy Perron wrote about the eccentricity of the dance that she had witnessed in 1976 during Lucinda Childs 45-minute solo; a remarkable and moving performance. The dance unfolded gradually, the spare, ritual-like gestures . . . eventually becoming manic and restless. She skittered and limped and bounced while making complicated darting hand signals. . . . The character changed with the speed of hallucinations intercepting one another. If I blinked, she may have turned from clown to baseball coach, or from didactic professor to drunkard. It was uncanny and it was beautiful. Perhaps with the growing times and the cast of the opera becoming more and more professional with each revival, the piece has started to lose the distinctive talents that were brought by the original cast. The current cast has separated dancers from singers, grown to a professional setting, and has perhaps even taken out such aspects such as physical contact between dancers. Perron stated remembersing the human contact and lifts in the original 1976 work thatwhich no longer exist in the piece at all. But, even though it lacked the appealing eccentricity of the original version, this Einstein still transported the audience to a state of mind where we noticed amazing small things. (Perron). Besides the actual performance quality, one critic even went asso far as to speculate the length of the opera as well. In tThe New York Times, Anthony Tommasini stated,: I am still not convinced that Einstein on the Beach would lose any of its mystical allure, vitality and wonderment if it were trimmed a bit. Maybe more than a bit. Critiques such as these are sure to come with any abstract work of art. Perhaps the work is outdated to some, perhaps it is a bit long, but perhaps it can still be meaningful.
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There is something that must be understood about the time period in order to understand why Einstein on the Beach was so inspired. Even the same Anthony Tommasini who thought the opera was far too long had something to say about the value of the piece in 1976. He stated that it was a declaration from the booming downtown scene directed against the established uptown culture, especially the complex, intellectual styles of contemporary music sanctioned within academia. Another critic, Arthur Holmberg, went even further to say that Einstein on the Beach was the most celebrated work from this period, a mystical farce, bringing together music, dance, drama, and visual art in one big band the nuclear fission of theatre. Whether or not it was truly the most celebrated piece of work is irrelevant to the fact that the mere collaboration of such a great variety of aspects created a wonderful piece of art. Beyond the careers of its creators, Einstein was perhaps the proudest product of the extraordinary Lower Manhattan performing-arts scene in the 1970s. Its dreamy, painterly beauty; its mystical longueurs; its hypnotic music; its allusions to the brilliance and danger of Einsteins work without ever quite stooping to the mere telling of a story: all spoke to a generation that still exerts a powerful hold on American, and global, vanguard arts (Rockwell).
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Perhaps Einstein on the Beach truly was more radical in 1976, but it was simply because the language was not generally known the visual language, the dramatic language, and the musical language (Shyer). As it has been performed in recent years, it has changed significantly,; not only in relation to the time period, but also in relation to the actual performance. The dancing has become more sophisticated and professional. The singers and the dancers are no longer the same people, but have been separated to produce greater quality. The makeup has been enhanced and, the lighting is modernized. The great dancers like Lucinda

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Childs are no longer in the piece, but are watching. But even with all of the differences, Einstein on the Beach still represents a pioneering event in opera history. It is a culmination of experiments in the union of image and sound. There is such a broad range of material incorporated in the piece, both visual and verbal, that are woveneaved together in a symbiotic relationship. Glass reflected, Einstein on the Bbeach has a tremendous impact on young audiences today. They have no idea you could get away with making theatre in such a nontraditional way. . . . Bob has the strongest signature youll find on the stage today. He has changed forever the way people think about theatre. (Holmberg). Robert Wilsons art is about showing us things that exist. He shows us what people do. He does not tell us why they exist. As in dreams, shapes and actions present themselves, disappear and return in other forms. . . .. Awake we analyze, interpret and try to find meaning. But Wilsons art is as elusive as the stuff of dreams. His theater is of images. He paints, constructs and architects the space of the stage and the time of our viewing with events, coincidents and objects which animate his personal and visionary landscape. (Wilson). Wind it back to the opening paragraph Like the title Einstein on the Beach Wilsons image evokes many responses and resonates many meanings, but yields no certain answers. Its not a question of what Einstein means, as Glass says, its that its meaningful. (Shyer).

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Comment [T6]: Find some way to talk about being meaningful, both from the audiences perspective and the performers perspective. Comment [T7]: Italics? Comment [T8]: Italics? Comment [T9]: Make sure that as you incorporate this into your conclusion, you help your audience understand what you mean by meaningful.