Director Robert Wilson has died

It was in June 1971, Paris discovered The Gaze of the Deaf , by Robert Wilson, at the Théâtre de la Musique (now the Gaîté-Lyrique). Louis Aragon saw the show and wrote a letter to his friend André Breton, who had long since joined the surrealist heavens.

In this long, moving letter, published in Les Lettres françaises , he recalls two walks they took together, very young, in the 1910s. One, in the Tuileries, where Breton had said to him: "If ever we stopped believing in miracles..." The other, on a quiet day, in the square next to the Gaîté-Lyrique, precisely: "Listen to the silence" , his friend had told him this time. Sixty years later, Aragon replied: "Well, that's precisely where the miracle happened. The silence. (...) The world of a deaf child opened up to us like a mute mouth. For more than four hours, we were going to inhabit this universe where, in the absence of words, of sounds, sixty characters will have no words but to move. I want to tell you right away, André, because, even if those who invented the show know nothing about it, it is for you that they are performing it, for you who would have loved it like me, madly. (…) I have never seen anything more beautiful in this world since I was born into it.

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