Robert Wilson and the CIVIL warS
In 1984, Robert Wilson was invited to create a representative work of American new theatre for the Los Angeles Olympic Games—an undertaking he himself came to regard as his only failure. The working process was documented by Howard Brookner, and the film Robert Wilson and the CIVIL warS was completed in 1986 and screened only a few times. Forty years later, the film documenting this traumatic episode in Wilson’s career has been restored.
Following the screening, a discussion on Robert Wilson and his theatrical oeuvre will take place with director Dragan Živadinov, who—through various formations of his theatre cycles within NSK and beyond—can be considered, like Wilson, one of the more prominent theatre reformers of the twentieth century; with Katarina Pejović, whose theatre-theoretical perspective, theatrical practice, and personal encounters with Wilson offer a compelling insight into the director’s work; and with director Dorian Šilec Petek, who spent part of his education at the art centre The Watermill in New York State, founded and ran by Wilson. The discussion will be moderated by Rok Vevar.
- Reading the Archive – a series of events
Film screening and discussion
3. 2.2026, 19.00, Slovenian Cinematheque
Guests: Katarina Pejović, Dorian Šilec Petek and Dragan Živadinov
Moderator: Rok Vevar
Organizers: Maska Ljubljana, Nomad Dance Academy Slovenia and Slovenian Cinematheque
The Reading the Archive programme, in collaboration with Nomad Dance Academy Slovenia, provides access to the history of contemporary dance. Participants watch archival material together and reflect on the aesthetic, historical, and social dimensions of the performances.
About
The American theatre director Robert Wilson (1941–2025) is one of the most significant figures in the history of theatre in the second half of the twentieth century—a major reformer who renewed theatre in line with the plans and visions of the European historical avant-gardes and the American neo-avant-gardes of the 1950s and 1960s. Wilson’s work is arguably more legible within the context of American contemporary dance currents and innovations in the visual and musical arts of the 1950s and 1960s than alongside the theatrical tendencies of the same period. His emblematic work, the opera Einstein on the Beach (1976), created in collaboration with Philip Glass and Lucinda Childs, became a landmark of twentieth-century modern theatre. One of its co-producers, through a substantial financial contribution, was the Belgrade-based BITEF (Belgrade International Theatre Festival), then led by Mira Trailović and Jovan Ćirilov. With this work, Wilson secured his entry into large-scale international theatre co-productions of the kind that became possible at a time when, across Europe and elsewhere in the world, cultural systems within various nation-states began to change for the first time since the Second World War.
