MONSTERS of Grace, the latest collaboration between designer/ director Robert Wilson and minimalist guru-composer Philip Glass, sets itself up for a monster bashing; it really does.
It proclaims itself a new-age opera, pushing the boundaries of the form into new territory and the next century, the world's first digitally animated opera, and so on. Seven of its 13 scenes (tableaux, really) consist of three-dimensional computer-animated images projected on to a huge film screen. The techniques used in the production of the still lives, landscapes, and portraits that con- stitute these scenes are brought to us - we are told - using the techniques evolved for the Jurassic Park monsters. And the team that developed the images for the opera is the one that produced the effects for films such as Stargate and Judge Dredd.
Part of the problem with all this is that we've been terrified by Jurassic Park, gobsmacked at Titanic and all the rest of them. If it's counting on its effects, per se - which it seems to be - Wilson and Glass's work is round about Neanderthal level on the evolutionary scale. And all the 3D glasses in the world (with which we view the animated scenes) can't disguise that fact.
As a piece, it's more hokum than opera. The music is Glass as ever was: chuntering chords and rolling arpeggios with long legato melodies; all very attractive. Four singers (in the pit with Glass and his trusty amplified band) croon away at lyrics by some unheard of thirteenth-century mystic which are so gauche and naive that cringe levels are off the scale.
Onstage, nothing happens - initially, literally, as we are subjected to 12 minutes of colour washes. A boy walks on, gets into a box, and is lifted aloft. Sundry piles of laundry slide slowly across the stage. Movement artists come on, stand around, look about - all very slowly and minimalistically. Get the picture? It's neither narrative nor descriptive. If it's about anything at all it's so elliptical it's round the bend and out of sight.
New age? More like new clothes, Emperor-wise.
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