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Inside the First Watermill Center Summer Festival Without Robert Wilson

Wilson built the Watermill Center to outlast him. This year's festival revealed how that vision lives on.

Last weekend, the Watermill Center’s annual Summer Festival 2026, ‘Limitless Time,’ presented by Van Cleef & Arpels, unfolded over two days, drawing more than a thousand well-heeled guests to its sprawling 10 acres in Watermill, Long Island. But this year’s festival was unlike others. It was the first Summer Festival since its founder, the indomitable Robert Wilson, passed away in 2025. How would this surreal, otherworldly festival fare without his direction and the moment of silence before the annual summer dinner he’d long become known for?

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There was little the legendary Robert Wilson didn’t do. An avant-garde director, playwright, choreographer, performer, set and lighting designer, sculptor, painter and video and sound artist, he collaborated with Philip Glass on the celebrated opera Einstein on the Beach, which nearly bankrupted him. Over the decades, he worked with the likes of Tom Waits, Laurie Anderson, Marina Abramović and Lady Gaga, among many other stars. In 1992, he founded the Watermill Center as a place for artists from around the world to explore their creativity and find support. The task of carrying it forward now falls to Charles Chemin, who has been part of the Watermill Center since he was 10 years old.

Saturday also happened to be the 50th anniversary of Einstein on the Beach. At the start of the night, Observer spoke with Noah Khoshbin, curator of the Watermill Center, who curated “DiAlogs,” an exhibition of Wilson’s three-dimensional work. Asked what Wilson might have thought of the show, Khoshbin said he believed he would have loved it. “He’d come in, go into each room, and move one chair a few feet. And then he’d say, ‘Bravo.'” As for the evening ahead, Khoshbin offered that guests would move through “a nonlinear, emotional reaction. The night would begin dreamlike, turn absurd, and become transcendent by the end.”

And absurdist it was. Tiki torches lit a path in the woods where a Lincoln Town Car, half covered in foliage, doors open, played a haunting oldies song. On the other side, a man sat inside a white billboard, legs dangling, lost on his phone. Beside him,........

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