NEW YORK – Robert Wilson, the acclaimed theatre director, playwright and visual artist who shattered theatrical norms with stunning stagings of his own imaginative works, as well as innovative collaborations with a diverse roster of artists from Philip Glass to Lady Gaga, died on July 31 at his home in Water Mill, New York. He was 83.

His death was confirmed by Mr Chris Green, the executor of his estate and president of the Robert Wilson Arts Foundation. He did not specify the cause, saying only that Wilson died after a brief illness.

Tall, soft-spoken and a conservative dresser, Wilson looked more like an accountant than an avant-gardist with a long resume of provocative productions. But there was nothing conventional about his sense of the stage.

He often said that he was less interested in dialogue and a narrative arc than in the interaction of light, space and movement. Even when he watched television, he said, he switched the sound off.

Early in his career, Wilson established a working method in which new pieces would begin not with lines of text but with richly detailed visual images, which he would either draw or describe in a ledger he carried with him.

“I’ve had the idea for a long time of a room with lots of books, all placed neatly on shelves, and something slicing through the shelves” was how he described his startling vision for his 1977 theatre piece, I Was Sitting On My Patio This Guy Appeared I Thought I Was Hallucinating.

In an interview with The New York Times shortly before its premiere, he went on: “There is a telephone, and a telephone wire. There is a scrim or gauze over the front of the stage, and images are sometimes projected on it.”

Dialogue would find its way into the ledger later in the process. It might be fragmentary and repetitious – or there might be none at all. The seven-hour Deafman Glance (Le Regard du Sourd), from 1971, and the 12-hour The Life And Times Of Joseph Stalin, from 1973, were entirely silent.

Even when directing William Shakespeare, Wilson sometimes had hi...