 Welcome everybody back to Segal Talks here at the Martin Segal Theatre Center in Midtown, Manhattan. It's a beautiful day in New York City. The sun is out and the first leaves are coming out like fingertips, like beautiful manicured fingertips of nature. And we had with us a great, great theatre artist, one of the distinguished great ones who we all know about. Who we love, who we adore. And it is so great to hear from him. Bob Wilson is with us. Bob, thank you for taking the time. Thank you. That's just incredible. Bob is one of the artists that made New York City a superpower in theatre. It comes out of a time when we had Joseph Chaykin and the Living Theatre Lomama, Meredith Mung, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Tricia Brown, the Wooster Group, the Great Mabou Minds We Just Lost, Lee Brewer, Reza Abdul, Jerome Robbins, the great Jerome Balanchine. It's a time where New York Theatre was a New York theatre and no one has put a stamp in a way on it also globally like Bob since Max Reinhardt, who was a great German director in the 20s and 30s. He has done work at Spencer Globe, it's truly global, it's eclectic, it's diverse. Every all the stuff we talk about, he always cared deeply deeply about community. We don't know that enough, I think. And I remember I read something once when someone talked to Merce Cunningham and Cunningham was a bit shy. And someone talked about him and I think it was John Cage who said, you know, you are the moon. Some people who talk about it, they are the finger that point to the moon, but that's not the moon. But Bob with us, I think, is the moon, he is in Watermill, which is a great, great contemporary art center, one of the greatest in the world. If this would be in Europe, they would have to put guards around it that people would try to sneak in and to be with it. Bob, I'm sorry I talk so much. Our Segal talks, we have now talked to over 150 artists from 50 countries. We were the only theater institution creating new content every day of the week during the time of Corona. It looks much better now. But it's all about listening and we would love to hear from you. First, Bob, if I can ask you, how are you? I'm fine. I've been here at the Watermill Center since December. But I leave at the end of next week. I'll go to Germany and we'll start working elsewhere. It's been wonderful to be on Long Island. Long Island is a special place. It was a place where artists have come for centuries. One is because of the light, this Long Island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. It's an extraordinary light all times of the year. Usually for winter and spring, I'm not here. It's been wonderful to experience the Watermill Center this time of year. And especially to see the early morning light and the evening light. I'm grateful for this time. Yeah, incredible to think that someone like you who moves so much, who works so hard. I don't know anybody who works more and harder than you do. And that you can't do your work. Where were you when Corona started? I was in Berlin. I was actually in Marrakesh and then I went to Berlin and then I was in Berlin for four months. Then went to France and I was able to produce a little work. The Messiah of Mozart. I did that in Paris and later Geneva. And I had created it at the beginning of last year in Salzburg. Yeah, incredible. And now we all think about theater. So in the moment we cannot do it. So many people now say, you know, we have to go out and the parks and find out what could be done. I think work outside in nature has always been part of your artistic practice. From Texas, I started working with special education with children with learning difficulties. A whole mixed bag of people. People in Niren, Lungs, I worked with. Head Start programs, preschool children, children in the first grade. Children from wealthy communities, from depressed communities, people of all ages. Then I slowly became a part of the art movement that was happening in lower Manhattan, which later became known as Soho. I had moved to lower Manhattan in 1965. Just before Donald Judd, the sculptor had moved just down the street, or Paula Cooper had opened a gallery. And I had, for the first time in my life, a large space 25 feet by 75. And it was an empty, large, empty space. It was there I created all my early works in the theater, my drawings and dance pieces. And I continued to work in N and the Ramblin happening when I started going to Europe and getting invitations to perform all over the world. Towards the end of the 80s, I was thinking maybe to stop working in the theater, to do something else. Anyway, I made the decision to acquire a piece of property on Long Island. And I wanted to move out of the city and to be with nature. And so I was fortunate to find this building in Watermill, which was in the township of Southampton. It was a building that had been abandoned in 1959 that was the laboratory for scientists who did experiments and telecommunications. And it reminded me a little bit of my loft that I had in Norman, Manhattan in the 60s. And I wanted to create a center, an international center for the arts and for the humanities. And do work that I couldn't do, let's say, the Paris Opera, the Piccolo Theater, the Chow Immune in Berlin are established institutions in and around the world. And my first play was written with a young Afro-American boy who had never been to school and knew no words. He was deaf. That play was seven hours long in silo. And my first play that had a text was written with an autistic boy, Christopher Knowles, and was putting together words in a mathematical, if they're concerned, with geometry, the use of language. It was visually arresting, with compositions. I became fascinated with his writing, and my first play with words was written with him. And I went on to make other works. I realized at the end of the 80s that to create those kind of works would be very difficult to do in an established institution. And I wanted to go back to my roots. So I came here to Long Island, to Watermelon, and established a center here in this factory-like building. In the 50s, they had 250 employees working for Western Union at the time. A place where I could do things that I couldn't do elsewhere. Always said, we have to do what no one else is doing. In the following years, I was fortunate to inquire some of the property around us. We were situated in 10 and a half acres of land. But it's been especially meaningful this past year with the virus and the situation with corona. To be here in nature, in a natural environment. It was one of the reasons I moved from Manhattan to here in 1989. Incredible. I remember seeing once a proposal you wrote, I think for the top of the World Trade Center, also kind of a research center. I hope I'm right, you had that vision, that idea that scientists and artists, people who are not performers, people come together and work. Even at a time when you were a small company and were not famous, you already had that vision. Is that right that you had on the top, you wanted to have a top of the World Trade Center as for work? That's correct. Raymond Andrews, the deaf new boy came to live with me, mothers and babies and free verbal communication study with babies and mothers. Before there was, there were speaking words, as we know. He was fascinated by Raymond's line work, because Raymond was intelligent, highly intelligent in some areas, but he thought in terms of visual signs and signals. We would often see things that you and I maybe would not see, because he was preoccupied on what he was seeing. That had a tremendous influence on the work I'm doing now, and it's been all my life, but it's a confirmation meeting Daniel Stern, who was a scientist from a completely different field. What is so incredible also was Raymond Andrews, and I think people don't know that, and I think you don't talk about it so often. I think you were on the way to New Jersey for your seminars to make some money in Maplewood or whatever it was, and he was beaten by a police. And you saw him on the street, the black boy. He couldn't even understand that the police, of course, didn't notice, didn't realize he was one of five, six, seven foster children, I think. And you said, you're interweaved, and policemen said, what are you, why do you care? And you said, you know, I want to do my civic duty. So it is an incredible moment where art intersected in reality at a time when there was, you know, the broken window theories like one window breaks and then you know the whole building goes down and the neighborhood so we have to arrest anyone. What Bob did, which I think is so incredible. He said, come with me to my workshop. I'm interested in your dreams. I'm interested in your drawings. What can I learn from you? You know, and you helped him to get out of that family that also didn't understand that he was, I mean, this is something incredible. And what I think your work in Waterloo is connected, they yet also be giving residencies to two artists in there. So I would like to hear from you about this idea, you are not, I mean, you are a great artist and you have great success and you make some money. But you know, we're near a Brad Pitt or a George Clooney who paid 20, 30 millions for 10 days. You struggle so hard to create water mill. And what does it mean to you? You learn by living. If I'd gone to Yale or if I'd gone to a drama school, Northwestern or whatever, I would never be making the kind of theater I'm making. Look, I do in the theater. I came about living life. I was walking down the street in Summit, New Jersey and I saw a policeman about to hit a boy over the head with a club. They grabbed his arm and said, why do you hit the boy? And the policeman said, it's none of your business. I said, but it is, I'm a responsible citizen. And as a result, I got to know the boy in this particular situation and I thought I thought in words and I thought he was intelligent, perhaps highly intelligent. He knew no words and he thought in terms of visual signs and signals. So my first play was written with him. It's not something I was planning to do or necessarily wanted to do. It's something that happened. The same thing with Christopher Gole, by chance I met him. And so the writing he was doing and he came to stay with me and worked with a small group of people and my first plays were how I had been silent. And then I had texts of Christopher Gole, organized like music. Those things would not have happened in big institutions that we have with each theater. So incredible on one hand you have that hand writing. One can really see this, what I think Susan sometimes said, you know, that's when you see an artist's work in a picture or, and you know from who it's from, you see the handwriting, that's a great artist and you do that. But yet, with Raymond and also with Christopher, you were interested, truly interested in the minds of others and put it into a form so radically different from what you are taught, you know, and this is all about your own realization of things. So you in a way did both and this is incredible. And, and I think also something that art can do instead, you know, just saying we have to have better foster care, we have to, you know, help the kid and get to school, but also to say engage as in the arts in the community in a place where you helped him and to connect and also, of course, Christopher, I know you went early also, if I'm right to water mill right as a, as a young kid, you were also not known and Jerome Robbins brought you to water mill to his center and was that an inspiration for you. I was fortunate that I, for a period of time, I was an assistant to Jerome Robbins and then to some mercy, rented a house here in Water Mill. I stayed in the house with him where he rented. At that time I had no idea that I would ever work in the theater. Like I was not so interested in theater. I was interested in being a painter. I was not a good painter. There were other things that interested me more. I ended up working in the theater, but I learned a lot from Jerry. More and more as I moved there, I realized how much I learned from him, things he said the way he talked about. When you talk about theater, Jerry said the most important second in theater is the last. The next is the first. You should have got the first, second right. He was brilliant in the way he, in time and space, constructed his work. And did you do an outdoor work there? I spoke with Noah who also helped me to prepare for it and all your outdoor work, but I wasn't aware that you did work in that time outside. Here at Water Mill. Incredible. Outside in the inner field. So maybe also I think car mountain in a way. I mean everybody is now thinking we don't have theaters. We can go in. Big theaters also. We cannot do everything is closed, artists are out of work, but you always continue. And also you're one of your great works at Car Mountain. I think 72 in Europe. It was completely outside. And a lot of people don't know about it. Can you tell us a bit about that idea you had, how to do something outside? Perhaps the festival in Shiraz or even Tehran, but there were no theaters. Western style theaters in Iran. So I went and I was expected to do something in Persepolis. And so overpowering and so interesting. I was overwhelmed. I was staying in Shiraz and I went into the foothills just outside of Shiraz and likes the being and the bareness of the desert. And so I thought to create a work in these foothills. And I was there on several different occasions and I discovered that there were seven foothills. They got progressively higher in the highest peak. There was an incredible overview of the desert. And at the base of the first hill was a graveyard or a Sufi poitz. And it was an oasis, a garden with fruit trees and fountains, a beautiful 17th century building. So I thought to maybe just start with this oasis, this Sufi, seven Sufi poids have been buried in this garden in the 13th century. To start there and to build a piece outdoors. So it turned out to be seven days long. And the first day was on the first hill and second day on the hill one and two and the third day on hill one to three. Until by the seventh day there were activities happening on all seven hills. And we worked with people from Latin America from North America. I brought students, factory workers, housewives from New Jersey, young people, middle-aged people from Europe and Central Europe. And working with people from Shiraz. Students had an elderly man who told stories in the bazaar in Shiraz. And we both had a big quail to go inside this quail and sit and the old man told stories in Persian. We had a Sufi poet who spoke in another location. I built the structure in such a way that say day one had a plan that started at midnight and went to midnight of the next day. And the first day had a theme of a flood. And I had 156 people. We had gathered to perform in the piece. So we broke it down in different groups. Let's say group one is 25 people or something. We put the first hour from midnight to 1 a.m. And created on the first hill something that had to do with the flood. And then the second group had from 2 a.m. to 3 a.m. And the theme was the flood and they could do whatever they want. And so each day had a theme. And the second day the group one came back and they had their slot of time from midnight to 1. And we created together a seven day play. So what I did was outline a big mega structure. And I did only one section. It was from I think it was from 8 to 9 each evening. And so it would be impossible for me to write a play that would be seven days long. But I made a mega structure. It would be an architect or let's say a city. The way an architect designs a building. This is a building. And then Frank lives in the building and he wants his apartment to be like that. I live in the building and I want my apartment to be like that. And someone else lives in the apartment and wants the apartment to be like that. And we all fill in our apartments with their own personalities. But there is a cohesion because there is a mega structure. So what I did to create the seven day play is to make a big mega structure. And then I worked with this group of people. Each one began to fill in their areas, their time slots, the way they wanted. Because we had themes for each day for the seven days. In some ways there was a cohesion. So you can come and go with all outdoors. If you wanted to go at two in the morning, you could go. If you wanted to go on a coffee break or two in the afternoon, you could go. If you wanted to go early in the morning and watch the sunrise, you could go. At that time I was thinking about maybe not. There shouldn't be too much difference between art and living. Sometimes there was someone just making a salad. Very ordinary things. We put it in the frame of theater. But there's not being too much difference between art and living. But there would always be going on the way you can go to a park on your day off. You can go on a coffee break to the park and sit, reflect. Watch trees move, people move. A bird or whatever you can daydream. But this would always be going on. Play would be always there. That was the kind of thing I was thinking about when I made the play in the early 70s. Incredible to think about everybody. I'm just using the name public theater. We cannot do anything because the rules are closed. We cannot rehearse the way we do. There's a work done already some time ago that seems so fresh. It was a big moment in the lives of performers. Life of Iran, what it stood for, what was possible in the time. And what just imagine someone would do something in five boroughs of New York City at the same time and met a structure. We had the New York project. But something like this, I think it had answers. It has answers for us in a time where we are all thinking what shall we be doing and stuff can be done also outside. In the free space we have. There's so much space in the world. On an airplane and you look out the window. Wow. It's so much space. That is true. And it's also not thought or that not used. The idea of community Bob. I know what a big community for over 20 years or 25 people come every summer. Thousands of artists have, you know, experimented you gave them as you said encouragement. You said nothing is more important than encouragement for artists, especially young artists. It's been a staple now, even, you know, in the long island a little bit. But the idea of community. And I know it's a serious one on your side and it's unknown. But what does it mean to you? What is a community? Why is that important to you? You could be, you, I know you were offered to run big theaters in Germany. People said, forget about America. They don't treat you right. They don't love you as they should come and run the Hamburg Tali. Theater. I know that. And you said, no, I want to do something in watermelon. People said it's crazy. It was at a time when it was a financial crisis. The museum. I think the Brooklyn Museum was only closed one or two days. Open one or two days at the time because they didn't have the money for the guards. And Bob said, no, I want to do a big structure in. In Long Island. And go back to the idea of workshop stuff I can do. Why is that so important to you? And what does it mean to you? When I created the foundation. There were four basic principles. One was that. In order for our community. To be. Rich. We must look to the past. From where we came. And that there should be some sort of balance. Supporting. Work of our time. Creation. For the balance. Looking at. Our history. For the history. For the history. For the history. For the history. For the history. For the history. For the history. Our history. Where we came. And then it's important that we. Support. Our community. The people that are immediately around us. In order for that community. To be rich. We must. Inform ourselves of what's happening in the community. At large. What is happening in the. What is happening. in Bahia and the jungle, what is happening with the Eskimos, what is happening with the aboriginal. So those were the four basic principles which we started with the foundation. The balance of interest and creating work of our time with the balance of interest and looking at the art of the past. Noel Mano who helped write the bylaws said if we don't look at the past and from where we came we will always be provincial. And it's important then that we support what is happening in our local community but for that local community to be rich we must have some understanding of what's happening globally, what's happening in other communities. By and large my tax dollar in the state of New York can only go to support the people of New York. If we want to be rich in New York City as a cultural capital of the world we must have an opportunity to see what's going on in the rest of the world. So I have here at the Watermelon Building Center a building that is a central building and there's no door which is an opening. So on the street there's no gate. You can walk into the property, you can walk into the building but there's no door. The Bible says behold I sat before the an open door and in the past few years with the current political environment it's been very difficult to bring certain people in. A Muslim or someone who has different religious beliefs, the new political ideas, a different color, skin. In an ideal way we must keep the door open. We strongly support an open door policy. We'll be someone with no education. The Raymond has no formal education. Working with Raymond I worked with Dan Stern with a high degree of education. The scientists keep the door open. Not easy. Yeah. Sure. What do you make of the current political situation? Well politics and religion will always divide us so much in what we get. The media is the talk of politicians, the conflicts with people of different religions but art and culture has the possibility to bring people together and in that way it can be unique in society. It's the only thing that will remain 5000 years from now if anything does remain. It's the artifacts of artists. Go back 5000 years ago and we look at artifacts. Look at the Egyptians, look at the Chinese, look at the Mayans, the Egyptians of any culture, the Persians. We're looking at artifacts. If we lose our roots, if we lose the knowledge of these artifacts, we lose our memory. It's important to hear at the bottom of the center. I mean, the founders of this land are the Seneca nation. Many of Americans live nearby. There are four positive facts. Yeah. Yeah. I mean to get back to you that New York to stay as a true cultural city in the world needs to be global. I remember from you, from others, if you would fill out two foundations on New York funding of the art, if you say you have an international collaborator who are already disqualified, you wouldn't get funding. You had these little black boxes where you had to write in what you want to do and if you would say you have an international collaborator, you're out. You wouldn't get it. And I think Brecht said the airplane, that's a good critique of the car. Someone didn't like the car. He said, well, let me see, but it didn't completely create the idea of the airplane, the Wright brothers and so many others. I think what you did in Watermelon also, you looked at theater and you adored so much of it, the great Jerome Robbins also who you knew and Balanchine and so many others. But he said, I'll create my own work as a people, I'll do something. I have in Watermelon as a center, as a community, as a shining example of what a theater artist can do, a single theater artist is stunning. And we all admire it so, so very much. I think you talked about the idea of the diamond. I know you studied interior architecture in Brooklyn, you know, in the way you are, you design our interiors. I always think like Carl Jung said, you know, the dreams is the only thing that hasn't happened. We create them, we see them, we write them. And you create these designs for us to meditate, to look, to connect to the present and past. And in a way, you know, this is a stunning, a stunning way to enrich all of us. So what do you, what do you feel, you know, is missing? What do you feel at the time we have now? What should, what should happen? What's not there? What do you miss so much? Be careful that our institutions don't become too institutionalized and too radical. Like fire can destroy you or it can warm you. But I think we need people need time and space to think. And with our social media with people congregating in cities and communities, we're bombarded with so much information that time to think is more and more needed. I was talking with a young man, quite young, who is from the Shennecock nation here. And he was speaking with one, this was last week, one of the elders in the community of the Shennecocks. He asked the elder how, how it was today as compared to how it was 50 years ago. And he said, you know, everyone talks slower. And people walk slower. So their perceptions were different. This is what the elder was telling him. But now the speeches become so rapid. I think it's one reason I came to Long Island to be here in a natural environment. Nature will affect our spiritual side. I'm now looking out a window and I see a fir tree that's barely moving in the air. It's amazing. It would be difficult to take the time to see that tree moving in Manhattan. Yeah. When it comes to walking, you said that the elder of the Shennecock nation that the walking was slower. You also created, I think in Iceland, to shelling a walking performance by the people. It was called walking. You might even redo it here, but what was the idea? I did something, it would be outdoors. And I walked from the south side, the north side, to the North Sea, about 45 minutes, 50 minutes. The piece eventually, that was called walking, where it took five hours to the North side of the island. They came from the outside and they did this walk. And the people who lived on the island made the walk as well. And many of the people that lived on the island have been on the island all of their lives. So they began to see things that they had not seen before. They hear things they had not heard before. And that their perceptions were altered simply by taking more time. I stuttered when I was younger and for years I was good. I was stuttering. And I was 17 and I met a woman named Bert Hoffman, she was called Ballet to a local school, local children in Waco, Texas. And she heard me stuttering and she said, take more time. Slow speed. I did. And within six weeks, I was more or less over the stuttering. And my parents had taken me to specialists in Chicago and St. Louis and elsewhere to overcome the stuttering. And this is a very simple thing that she said to take more time. And as if I was speeding in place, the difficulties we've had with coronavirus and somebody's been a blessing because it's given many of us more time for reflection. You did change you? I mean, I know how much you were, how far you planted it once, how even for us that you gave us today the time, you know, you fulfilled your schedules. Did this change you? Now that time, of course, I did it. Or did it confirm something? Are you different, Bob, than last March? With John Cage, everything is different. It's all the same, let me say, but I always liked what Einstein said. He said, oh, Mr. Einstein, can you repeat what you just said? Well, there's no need for me to repeat what I just said, because it's all the same thought. Yes, I'm changed. I'm different, but it's the same person. It's like a tree that it can be on the storm. It can have leaves, the leaves fall off and whatever, but it's always the same tree. It's always flowing. Of course, I'm different this year than I was last year, but it's the same signature, the same body, the same hand making the drawing. So are you creating something? What did you do? What did you do when you can't go or you cannot be on the stage and adjust the lighting? Anybody who does not Bob creates work, he does the choreography in the first week or days, then words come on it, if they are words, and then half of the time, light comes in and custom and you're every second this will be done. So now you're in a room, you're at watermelon or you're in Berlin. What did you do? How did you create something? Were you able to create? The Salva Palace. It's an 18th century mud building, insulation, no projections. It was all done experience for me. I also did something in the financial district in Riyadh, in the old part of the city. It was all virtual? You were not there in person? You did it by? I had a team of some people that I've worked with and some people that I haven't worked with. I did it all virtually. The light something virtually was not easy. I never saw it. Did you learn something? Was it something unexpected that you felt? Something I had never done before. In 1965, I had been asked to direct a group of delinquent kids in San Antonio, Texas, for the Hemisphere Fair. Howard Klein and the Rockefeller Foundation, a grant was given to bring a group of delinquent kids from Latin America and then a group of delinquent kids from North America together and create something for this Hemisphere Fair. We were to build sculptures and various things. To build sculptures, we had ordered materials, tape measures, hammers, saws, different materials that we could work with. As it turned out, the materials never arrived, but the support of the young kids from Latin America and from North America arrived and they arrived. The director of this fair said, what are you going to do? We went to a junkyard and we found materials. You think, well, to put two boards together, you need a hammer and a nail. But actually, if you don't have a hammer and if you don't have a nail, you can put two boards together and tie them together with a tree vine. Find other ways of binding them together. We found ways. We managed to get an advertising company that gave us billboards and we had a dozen billboards throughout San Antonio and the kids, we got paint donated and we painted these billboards. The kids could paint whatever they wanted on the billboard. So if you're driving through one of the freeways in San Antonio, you would see the big painting that a kid from Brazil could paint. So much of education is the idea of how to do something. You can see in this case that we had to invent a way of doing it. The conventional idea of a hammer and a nail to put two boards together with just an intellectual idea. There are many ways that it can be done. One of the dilemmas they often in education is that it becomes very intellectual. Not that it shouldn't, but there are other ways to think about whatever it is that we want to do. I'm now making, I'll go next week to Germany, in Düsseldorf. I'm doing a version, kind of version of Dorian Gray. I think it's actually turning out to be more about Francis Bacon, but I'll do it in the Schauspielhaus in Düsseldorf. I will be 80 years old in October and four events that I will be doing in celebration of my 80th birthday in Paris. I'm going to do something at the Paris Opera. I'll do something, a dance piece with Lucinda Childs and Jennifer Cove, classical violinist, St. Bach. We're going to do sound and circulation in St. Schiappelli. How do you feel about becoming 80? 80 years old. I feel like I'm still two years old. During this lockdown, I made some drawings. My assistant, I've been drawing one of the things I've done consistently throughout my life. I had paper and I was going to make some drawings with each. I don't know how to do it, what to do. I often feel that if I'm starting a new work, I don't know how to do it. You just do something and then let that talk to you and do something else. Do the wrong thing. Yeah, these are incredible lessons and it sounds so easy, you know, like we said before, try to find another way to do things and then something, but do it. As you said now, make a mistake and then you say, I don't know, it's hard to believe, but I believe you. You say, I don't know how I'm going to solve this, you know, that you start out and create something. What would you say? We have often young artists, you know, they are from around the world, from Hungary and from Latvia and India. I was ever listening to our little Seville talks. What do you say to them in this time of corona? What from your great experience in life, from your art that has also touched me? What do you tell them? What do you want to do in life? Mr. Wilson, if you've worked long enough and hard enough, worked long enough and she says things, often I don't look for things, things come to me, right? She was a movement or something. Our times, Mel Guesso, a dance critic, he had watched a rehearsal that she had made the rehearsal. Oh, tell me, Ms. Graham, what is it like for you to make a ballet? She said, I chart the graph of my art. Incredible. Well, she said in her autobiography, the first line, I am a dancer. I learned by practice. Yeah. Yeah. So that's, that's important for everybody to really, really listen to that, you know, practice, take your time, work hard and something, you will find something. And I think it's actually, it is true. And also you will find something with, kind of speaks to you as in Rumi, you spoke about a Sufi poet, Rumi said, that what you are seeking is also seeking you, but you have to be seeking. But it is incredible that you take, took time out and then we could hear from you in the middle still, you know, somehow, some kind of a lockdown in theater. I know the only thing that normally was cutting you down were Christmas holidays in Europe. And you said, why can't we rehearse? But they said, no, Mr. Wilson, it's a Christmas. And he said, okay, whatever, I have to go to Bali or something. But now for such a long time. But I hope also it recharged a bit and connected you with something you often talked about watermelons, the diamond, I think you made that drawing in Prat when you're young, you know, and someone from the Bauhaus, you know, Nagi said, Bob Wilson, or the class, do something in five minutes, design a city and you had a diamond where in the square where more light would come out. And what comes in, that's what a diamond is. You might lose a lot of weight when you cut it a special way, but more light comes out. And you've put in so much, so much energy and time and love and money. But still what comes out of watermelons so, so much more is an incredible contribution to contemporary global arts to the American arts to the New York arts. And it should be supported. Anybody who supported us, we thank them. Thousands of artists went through the residency, the great open houses at Watermelons, the fundraising days. And so many people have also worked supported you, but you also inspired them. So we are so happy to have heard from you that you took the time and that you were also part of all these 100, 150 artists. Often we have artists from places we haven't heard yet or nobody has seen their work, but we feel it's important to listen to everybody. So it's a great compliment to anybody who was also with us. And I like the idea of the mega structure. We at the city want to get involved in the New York City parks and create perhaps in 23 international global festival for New York. I hope you maybe in some way you could help us or be involved or Watermel could be a part of it. We're going to continue next week. This was the very opening of our spring season. We are so really Bob honored. And I want to say thank you and thank you. My honor. Yeah. And next week we have Olga Garay from Los Angeles Cultural Department for the Doris Dube Foundation, who's been a great supporter of international global work. And she's thinking, how can we get touring done? We have John Glover from the New York U-Symphony and the on-site opera. He is talking just about work he does outside or inside in stores that are closed in New York. And Petja Musielic from the Baryshnikov Art Center, they will talk to us about their work, what they are doing at the moment. And we will go on and I hope all our audience members will come back and listen to us. We also an open center. Let us know your ideas. And Bob, I hope to see you and I hope to get out to Watermel. See the new house. You've created a house for residents and artists. I haven't seen it yet. Noah told me about it. And Roger, the architect, did it. So it's an incredible life thing. And it also shows what art can do, what theater can do, but also one person can make such a difference. So Bob, thank you. Thank you, Eli, for helping us to arrange all of this. And we wish you all the best. And I want you to direct till you're 110. We have better medical help than Martha Graham had now. So keep on. It means a lot to us. It's important what you do. It is meaningful. And it's of urgency and of your life experience of having done so much to see what you are doing now. It's just, it's a blessing. So thank you, Bob, and all my best. Okay, thank you for it. Great to see you. Great to see you again. Bye, bye, Bob. Thank you.