The Maturing of Minimalism

By Michael Walsh

When the furious energy that has fueled an artistic movement dissipates, what is left? When the youthful goals of discomfiting elders and shocking the bourgeoisie have been achieved, what remains to be accomplished? Can an erstwhile avant-garde development settle comfortably into maturity and still avoid middle-age spread?

Twenty years or so after the rise of minimalism, and almost a decade after Composer Philip Glass and Theater Artist Robert Wilson detonated Einstein on the Beach at the Metropolitan Opera House, the answers are appearing. Last week in Cambridge, Mass., the American Repertory Theater (ART) offered the world premiere of The Juniper Tree, a collaborative opera by Glass and Composer Robert Moran, in a staging by Director Andrei Serban. The event demonstrated how pervasive minimalism's influence has become, and what promise it still holds.

Glass and Wilson began as cultural rebels, "downtown" artists in New York City's bohemian SoHo district who shared a radical aesthetic. Linked not only by ideals but by the cultural establishment's chilly rejection of their efforts, they and several like-minded colleagues forged a style that prized content over form, emotion over intellectuality; gradually, they won over wider audiences with the uncompromising excellence of their visions. Today Glass's relentless, repetitious music has become gentler, smoother, subtler and more flexible. Wilson's stream-of-consciousness stage pictures, which are intended to evoke emotional states rather than further conventional narrative, are beginning to creep into common director's parlance.

Based on an especially grisly Brothers Grimm fairy tale, the Juniper Tree libretto, by Children's Author Arthur Yorinks, recounts the fable of an evil stepmother (Mezzo Ruby Hinds) who murders her stepson (Soprano Lynn Torgove) and serves the dismembered boy to his father (Baritone Sanford Sylvan) in a stew. His spirit reincarnated as a bird, the boy takes his revenge by dropping a millstone on the stepmother and is joyfully restored to his father and half sister. Watching over all is the juniper tree, in which dwells the benign spirit of the boy's real mother.

Wisely, Glass and Moran have chosen to emphasize the tale's elements of love and redemption, instead of its gruesome aspects. Glass's familiar style is aptly suited to express transfigured states like the fatal ecstasy of the first wife, who dies giving birth to her beloved son, while Moran's more muscular music communicates the horror of the murder without wallowing in it, the way the detached, matterof-fact language of a fable does.

In dividing the opera's six scenes roughly equally between them, the composers have maintained stylistic integrity even while sharing melodic motifs and a unified dramatic plan. The interplay between them is slickly accomplished, especially in the final scene, when Moran picks up Glass's folk- style setting of the bird's lament and brings the opera to a peaceful close. Musical collaborations historically have not been very successful, but Glass's hypnotic arpeggios and Moran's dry Stravinskian syncopations are harmoniously soldered in a chamber opera that should prove practical and durable. The Juniper Tree represents the triumph of experience over youth.

Earlier Serban opera productions, notably a misbegotten Turandot for London's Royal Opera House, have been willful. But in The Juniper Tree he has had the good sense to emulate the haunting imagery and striking tableaux that are Wilson's hallmarks. The tree, whose branches agonizingly split apart as the father dines lustily on his unholy supper, is pure Wilson; so is the unexpected apparition of the first wife, aboard what appears to be a rhinoceros, as the guilty stepmother's conscience afflicts her.

The absorption of Wilson and Glass into the cultural mainstream is not surprising. In the evolution of art, the substantial contributions of the avant-garde become part of the culture. In addition to The Juniper Tree, the current ART season also features Wilson's adaptation of Euripides' Alcestis, with music by Performance Artist Laurie Anderson. And the recently concluded Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music had as a highlight Wilson's theater piece The Golden Windows, an elusive love story with a Beckett-like nonsense text and some startling stage pictures, including an earthquake that sunders the stage and a dazzling meteor shower. Just as the West German city of Darmstadt nurtured the post-Webern twelve-tone composers after World War II, so has the Brooklyn Academy offered a safe haven for the minimalists from SoHo.

Too safe, perhaps? The edge of contemporary music-dance theater is now to be found in West Germany, where Choreographer Pina Bausch and a coterie of disciples are taking the 60-year-old tradition of German Ausdruckstanz (dance of expression) and transforming it into the even rawer and more visceral Tanztheater. Their work, several vivid examples of which were seen in Brooklyn this fall, is a cultural outcry that rends the emotions: the tumult of a displaced culture engaged in profound self-examination.

By contrast, the American avant-garde appears largely to have conquered the angst that it felt during the '60s. It has lost much of its rebelliousness, but in so doing has discovered a more delicate mode of expression as well as a broader popular base. To refine and succeed is not necessarily to become complacent or sell out. The crucial thing for any style is to avoid both self- satisfaction and self-parody, to keep the visions fresh. If The Juniper Tree is any indication, the American avant-garde is alive and well, just a little older and wiser.