“Orlando is a true collaboration in that it incorporates a Western vocabulary of movement and images, based on Virginia Woolf’s text of Orlando and deriving from my background as an architect, from my life in the theater, and from my work as a visual artist.
“This work is counter-pointed and complemented by the classically trained Beijing opera star Wei Hai-min (魏海敏), which definitely brings an ancient sense of Chinese culture to the work — a culture where movement, language, the difference between spoken and sung words, are all very different from what I’ve inherited from my Western roots.
“I see this work as being one whole made of two opposites — the way you have two hands but one body, two sides of the brain, but one mind.
“This new Taipei production is based on earlier ones I did in Paris with Isabelle Huppert and in England with Miranda Richardson. The text and music are different, however, as well as the movement, because they are adapted to the talents of the great Wei Hai-min.
“As for the music, it will use traditional Chinese instruments and at times very profound contemporary electronic sounds.” ----Robert Wilson

“Orlando is a true collaboration in that it incorporates a Western vocabulary of movement and images, based on Virginia Woolf’s text of Orlando and deriving from my background as an architect, from my life in the theater, and from my work as a visual artist.
“This work is counter-pointed and complemented by the classically trained Beijing opera star Wei Hai-min (魏海敏), which definitely brings an ancient sense of Chinese culture to the work — a culture where movement, language, the difference between spoken and sung words, are all very different from what I’ve inherited from my Western roots.
“I see this work as being one whole made of two opposites — the way you have two hands but one body, two sides of the brain, but one mind.
“This new Taipei production is based on earlier ones I did in Paris with Isabelle Huppert and in England with Miranda Richardson. The text and music are different, however, as well as the movement, because they are adapted to the talents of the great Wei Hai-min.
“As for the music, it will use traditional Chinese instruments and at times very profound contemporary electronic sounds.” ----Robert Wilson

Mary Said What She Said is a three-part monologue of 86 paragraphs that makes clear its intent right from the outset: »Memory, open my heart.« Mary, Queen of Scots and, for a while, Queen of France, reviews her life as ‘the one and only Mary in Scotland and the Isles’, a worthy pretender also to the English throne. We learn that this long study in remembrance takes place just as she has been sentenced to death by beheading by her cousin Elizabeth I, Queen of England, and stands accused of conspiring against her. But it is also a play in the course of which Mary composes a drama of her life, a life whose trajectory begins more or less with her birth and ends with a heart-rending letter of farewell written in French to her brother-in-law Henry III, King of France, on the eve of her death. The timeline unfolds as if the memory of it came to her through free associations. The journey takes us from one surprise to the next, marked by the twists and turns of an existence interspersed by all-too-short periods of happiness and unspeakable calamities. A singular wealth of details, simple and charming, mingles with an impla-cable destiny. Is she searching for her true self? Who can say? After all, what she does know and keeps reminding us is that she is queen and, as such, sacred, and that she proclaims her innocence.