\n<\/p>\n
\n\tTom Waits<\/a> and Kathleen Brennan have shared a tribute to their friend and frequent collaborator, Robert Wilson, the renowned theater director, playwright, and artist, who died late last month at the age of 83.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cBob was among the artists who see, feel, hear, and sense the world in a way that most don\u2019t experience it and want that experience to be shared and to connect others also immersed and suspended between the breaths of Life,\u201d Waits and Brennan wrote. \u201cBob set course for the unseen portals of his imagination and gathered brave, adventurous, devoted, gifted, and brilliant artists, and crews and devotees and opened many hearts and eyes.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tWilson was renowned<\/a> for his provocative productions, which were often built around his unique approach to staging, as opposed to dialog or narrative. He founded the Watermill Center, a self-described \u201claboratory for performance,\u201d and collaborated with numerous luminaries at the avant-garde and pop nexus, including Lou Reed, Susan Sontag, Lady Gaga, Philip Glass, and William Burroughs.<\/p>\n \n\tWaits and Brennan were among his most frequent collaborators. In the late Eighties, Waits wrote the music for Wilson\u2019s play The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets<\/em>, later recording many of those songs for his 1993 album, The Black Rider<\/a><\/em>. Similarly, Waits and Brennan wrote the music for Wilson\u2019s 1992 play Alice <\/em>and his 2000 production Woyzeck<\/em>; the songs for those projects were eventually recorded for Waits\u2019 albums, Alice<\/a><\/em> and Blood Money<\/a><\/em>, both of which arrived in 2002.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cOver 40 years of loving Bob and still he astounds,\u201d Waits and Brennan wrote. \u201cHis vodka paintbrush of absurdity, vaudeville, heartbreak and forgiveness and imagination of the infinite is still wet and painting backdrops backwards behind the Mirror into the wee hours of the morning of his opening night! We will always be suspended in his orbit.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThe couple went on to remember the multi-faceted nature of Wilson\u2019s creativity, calling him an \u201cabsolute amethyst of an actor \u2026 a space floating astronaut.\u201d They celebrated his ability to come up with \u201c6 impossible things before breakfast to stage, to paint, to costume, to build, draw, perform, choreograph, film, design \u2026 to light into Life and darkness.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n