Robert Wilson first came to public notice when he staged The Life and Time of Sigmund Freud at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1970. He began to acquire his growing international reputation the following year when Deafman Glance transferred from Brooklyn to Paris, via the Nancy Festival. In Paris, he provoked as much adulation as dismissal, both public and critical. One convert to his theatrical style was Louis Aragon, who saw in Wilson the logical heir to the Surrealists. Aragon once belonged to the Surrealist movement but turned his back on it. It now seems he is willing to take it seriously once more, thanks to Wilson. If Wilson achieves nothing more, that alone would be worth the effort.

His Paris success at the Théâtre de Paris and a newly devised companion piece in a radically different manner called Prelude that was centrally staged in one of the auditoriums of the Espace Cardin earned Wilson an invitation to the Shiraz Festival in 1972 in Iran.