Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 40

34 Popular Culture Review Above the singers, an enormous screen (perhaps 100’ long and 30’ high) vibrates with a series of disparate and haunting images, faultlessly projected in stereoscopic verisimilitude. In a mountainous terrain, a series of helicopters flies through the skies aimlessly, as if engaged in a reconnaissance mission without any concrete objective. A series of attenuated tendrils, or sinews, lead to a decapitated hand, which turns and gestures towards the audience, its fingers extending out into space over the heads of the crowd, as a small knife traces the lifelines of the disem bodied hand in minuscule rivulets of blood. A house drifts out to sea, past a dense and lushly populated jungle, then past a distant, monolithic metropolis, and finally past an enormous iceberg, while a sea serpent threatens to devour the house and its inhabitants, who glide towards each other in a trance, on the rooftop of the derelict abode. Notes Glass, creating “the animation was fim. I’ve always loved Robert’s work, and to see it jump out of the screen at you is really exhilarating. It is truly something that has to be seen to be believed” (Brown 53). At other points in Monsters o f Grace, the images become even more ab stract, as when a series of glowing lines stretch across the screen in ethereal slow motion, creating a series of luminescent Mandarin paintings in the simulacric 3-D performance space. What is most impressive about Monsters o f Grace, as I have previously suggested, is that it can easily be taken out on tour in its “original” form, with the original performers, rather than in an inferior “road company” ver sion that dilutes and vitiates both the quality and intensity of the work. While traditional opera relies upon hyperspectacle, with enormous sets and ornate cos tumes, in addition to a company of performers. Monsters o f Grace signals the dawn of a new operatic performance style, in which economy of presentation is not allowed to affect the emotional impact of the work. When the Metropolitan Opera presents La Traviata in Central Park as part of their annual summer series of free presentations, for example, the visual aspect of the work is almost entirely sacrificed in order to transport the performance into the public sphere. Sets, cos tumes, even stage directions are almost entirely eliminated. What results is only an approximation of the actual experience of wit nessing La Traviata on stage at the Met, in which the performers must carry both the burden of the spectacle and the rituals of presentation, without any aid from the imposing physical sets they are used to inhabiting, and relying upon. By contrast, one could easily imagine an outdoor evening presentation of Monsters o f Grace being every bit as effective as one witnessed on stage; as long as the 3-D image projection quality is maintained, nothing would be sacrificed. But to better under stand the impact, and the prescient example that Monsters o f Grace presents for contemporary audiences, a bit of history on both the performance piece itself, and the careers of those involved in its production, is both instructive and necessary. Philip Glass was bom in Baltimore, MD, and as a child, received a rather