Glass/Wilson's "Monsters of Grace" heralds new perspectives in performance at Mass MoCA, 7/17/99

by Seth Rogovoy

(NORTH ADAMS, Mass., July 18, 1999) - Among the more obvious questions raised by "Monsters of Grace," performed at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art on Saturday night, was what was it? A film with live music? A concert with atmospheric film footage? A high-tech, highbrow music video? A new kind of museum experience, as the designer suggests, or the shape of "21st-century theater" to come, as the producer claims? Or, "a digital opera in three dimensions," as the program had it?

Questions of genre aside, "Monsters of Grace," with music by Philip Glass, visual design by Robert Wilson, and animation by Mass MoCA's own Kleiser-Walczak Construction Co., was a provocative, multi-media performance -- state-of-the-art in both form and content and richly suggestive in posing questions about how art is or should be perceived.

One of the first lines sung -- in a libretto that was apparently loosely adapted from the ecstatic love poetry of the 13th century Persian mystic Jalaluddin Rumi and performed in English translation -- was, "We have fallen into a place where everything is music."

As much as anything, this line offered a key for how to approach the total, 75-minute, multi-sensory experience that was "Monsters of Grace." It suggested that viewers, who were provided with an updated version of the cardboard tinted glasses from 1950s 3-D horror films, immediately dispense with any expectations of coherent narrative in the three-dimensional imagery projected in 70 mm. film, or in the literal concerns of the inspirational lyrics, which contained such epigrams as, "Don't go back to sleep," "You must ask for what you really want," and, one especially appropriate for these climes (if not for this season), "My worst habit is I get so tired of winter….I become a torture to those I'm with."

Rather, it said, listen to Glass's music, for his compositional strategy functioned as a kind of grammar of interpretation. Glass's dynamic score - performed live by the ensemble that bears his name, although the composer himself was not in attendance - relied on shifting perspective for its dynamism. In general, Glass composes in the musical equivalent of three-dimensional imagery. His works are powered by the contrast between repetitive background figures and shifting foregrounds, so that subtle changes in melody, such as they are, emerge into and out of "view."

In his "Monsters" score, Glass achieved these effects in his typical manner, through "minimalist" shifts in rhythmic figures and melodic ostinatos, but also via the particular tonal qualities which gave this opera its unique character. In keeping with the Eastern theme of Rumi's source material, Glass sampled a variety of ancient instruments -- including the santur, the tar, and the oud - and thus his shifting palette included an ancient vs. modern dynamic when these samples merged with or emerged from the more modern-sounding flutes, woodwinds and keyboard synthesizers.

These rhythmic and tonal juxtapositions had their visual correspondences when helicopters flew over a pagoda-laced Himalayan landscape, or when a three-dimensional cube - a reference to the monolith from "2001"? - appeared in a desert of Biblical proportion, or when a contemporary, suburban house floated past a Rousseau-like jungle and then a range of icebergs, only to be swallowed whole by a mythical sea creature.

Wilson's surrealistic or dreamlike images also gained resonance through their iconographic associations. Scenes were strewn with Biblical, religious and mythical references, some filtered through previous works of art, such as a God-like hand out of Michelangelo, others of a more original cast, such as a snake coiled around an Asian table setting. Several of the scenes suggested characters unmoored, adrift, literally "at sea" - their disjunction from their environment in a sense mirroring the viewer's temporary sense of dislocation.

It wasn't just the objective content of the imagery that provided these contrasts or sense of dislocation, but also their design, arrangement and execution. For one, there were the very Wilsonian touches, in which -- in stark contrast to contemporary video's hypercharged action sequences -- movement occurred mostly in slow motion. (Not, however, always as slow as one expected or even hoped for - call me an aesthetic masochist, but I wanted to squirm a bit more, sensing that the moving images would have had greater emotional impact had they been even more glacially timed).

There were other visual devices borrowed from photography, such as depth of field and harrowing close-ups, that underlined the theme of shifting perspectives, particularly in reference to foreground and background. Most obviously, the three-dimensional effects provoked a hyper-realized sense of space as objects seemingly hovered over the audience, a human finger stretching out from the screen and touching the person in front of me, all the way back in the last few rows of the theater where we were seated.

Robert Wilson has been quoted as saying, "Basically what I'm doing is creating time and space," and indeed, with such devices at hand as Glass's repetitive, hypnotic phrases that punctuate time and Kleiser-Walczak's plane-busting visuals that violate the laws of physics, Wilson succeeds at just that. He has also said, "You go to our opera like you go to a museum….Look at the music. Listen to the pictures." This was indeed the effect the show had, suggesting that it might ultimately prove as influential on the way museumgoers experience art as it might be on live performance.

It remains to be seen if "Monsters of Grace" truly heralds a new era in theater or opera, one in which digital technology and Kleiser-Walczak's patented "synthespians" will usurp the role of live actors. Neither is that the intention or the point. What is doubtless happening is what has always happened -- artists of great talent and vision are experimenting at the edges of human thought and perception, building upon what has come before and using the latest tools at hand to ask the same, age-old questions that probe deep into the essence of the human condition.

In this case, it just happened to be created and exhibited right here at Mass MoCA, and probably served as an ideal representation for what that new cultural factory is all about. And that is incredibly exciting.

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