Born to Waco, Texas, Robert Wilson is among the world's leading visual and theatrical artists. His work uses a variety of artistic techniques, masterfully integrating movement, dance, painting, light, design, sculpture, music and dramaturgy. After studying at the University of Texas and the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, in the mid-1960s, Wilson founded to New York the art collective "The Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds" with which he developed his first original shows, Deafman Glance - The Gaze of the Deaf (1970) and _A Letter for Queen Victoria _(1974 -1975). In 1976 he signed with Philip Glass Einstein on the Beach, a performance that changed the conventional conception ofopera as an artistic form. Over the years he has forged collaborations with such authors and musicians as Heiner Müller, Tom Waits, Susan Sontag, Laurie Anderson, William Burroughs, Lou Reed, and Jessye Norman. Wilson's drawings, paintings and sculptures have been shown in hundreds of group and solo exhibitions, and are part of private collections and museums worldwide. He has received numerous awards and honors, including a Pulitzer Prize nomination, two Ubu Prizes, the Golden Lion for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale, and the Laurence Olivier Award. He has been appointed to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and Commandeur des arts et des lettres in France. Wilson is the founder and artistic director of the Watermill Center, a creative laboratory dedicated to the arts, based at to Watermill, Long Island.

Born in Eppendorf, Saxony, in 1929, Heiner Müller is considered the most important German author since Bertolt Brecht. His art has distinguished itself in theater and poetry, making him also a writer and essayist of merit. Müller's work, with its enigmatic and fragmentary texts, is a significant contribution to postmodern theater. The author addressed the problems of the concrete realization of the new society, while highlighting its persistent contradictions and emerging obstacles, generated to to the individual's own detriment. His works, which have also included retranscriptions of Greek and Shakespearean tragedies(Philoktet, 1965; Ödipus Tyrann, 1967; Prometheus, 1969; Macbeth, 1972) include Germania Tod in Berlin (1971), _Die Schlacht and Traktor _(1975), _Leben Gundlings. Friedrich von Preussen. Lessings Schlaf Traum Schrei _(1976), aggressively parodying bourgeois ideals. However, it is the phase of the 1980s in which he arrives at a new dramaturgical language, in which the reduction of the plot is combined with a sorrowful pessimism. Texts from this period include Hamletmachine (1986) and Quartett (1987), both of which he entrusted to the direction of Robert Wilson, with whom he had long before welded a strong friendship and intense collaboration. Thanks to his fervent activity, Müller was admitted to the East German Academy of Arts (1984) and the West Berlin Academy of Arts (1986). He joined the directorate of the Berliner Ensemble in 1992 and became artistic director in 1995, shortly before his death.