NEW VISIONS
Wren, Celia
STAGE Celia Wren NEW VISIONS Lincoln Center crossdresses Like a physicist yearning for a grand unifying theory, Richard Wagner dreamed of a "total art" that would incorporate all...
...Though few other creators have been as madly ambitious, a constant cross-pollination between fields has taken art a step or two toward Wagner's ideal...
...It is important to keep testing boundaries...
...Lincoln Center's new interdisciplinary series, which will be an ongoing program, made its debut in January with Moondrunk, a concert-meets-dream ballet fantasia in which dancers, whirling amid heaps of purple dust bunnies, gave kinesthetic expression to Arnold Schoenberg's eerie vocal work Pierrot lunaire...
...STAGE Celia Wren NEW VISIONS Lincoln Center crossdresses Like a physicist yearning for a grand unifying theory, Richard Wagner dreamed of a "total art" that would incorporate all disciplines...
...Choreographers like Agnes de Mille and Jerome Robbins wove dance into the fabric of musicals...
...After all, if Shakespeare had stuck to the dramatic rules of his time— limiting a play's scope to a single setting and a single twenty-four hour period—wouldn't our theater be poorer...
...Even when the product of an artistic experiment is not completely satisfying in itself, the process of mounting or viewing it may spark new ideas that we can use when working on more mainstream fare...
...Revealing aspirations even more Wagnerian, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts recently kicked off a new initiative—the "New Visions" series— which aims to splice classical music, drama, and dance, in hopes of "extending the boundaries of the concert experience and creating vital new theatrical forms...
...But it is this kind of adventurism that keeps us from taking traditional genres for granted, leading to endless stale repetitions of the tried-and-true...
...This enterprise may seem a little esoteric...
...Following up on this whimsical monCommonweal 3 3 April 9,1999...
...Pablo Picasso designed sets for Serge Diaghilev's ballets...
...And contemporary experimental theater troupes mix film and drama with impunity—as New York's outrageous Wooster Group has recently in House/Lights, a perplexing, high-tech hybrid of a cult soft-porn movie and a play by Gertrude Stein...
Vol. 126 • April 1999 • No. 7
