He expanded our sense of what could happen on a stage by starkly limiting the action. In a climactic scene from “Einstein on the Beach,” his profoundly influential, nearly five-hour collaboration with the composer Philip Glass from 1976, a 30-foot bar of light gradually rotated from horizontal to vertical, then rose into the flies. That was it.

Robert Wilson, a leader in avant-garde theater who collaborated with Philip Glass, David Byrne and Lady Gaga over his six-decade career, has died. He was 83.

Wilson, whose work was often characterized by distinct lighting and the expansion of time, worked with art world luminaries like Laurie Anderson, Jim Jarmusch, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Allen Ginsberg, and