Meredith Monk’s Atlas of Sound: New Opera and the American Performance Tradition

MeredithMonk's Atlas of Sound New Opera and the American PerformanceTradition Bonnie Marranca IN THE HISTORY of modernist performance ideas the representation of the body in space has always been shaped by each theatrical generation's expression of the search for spiritual renewal. This persistent though often overlooked theme of theatrical modernism, extending from its beginnings in Symbolism to our own turn-of-century, is at the center of Meredith Monk's oeuvre, nowhere more expansively than in her first full-scale opera conceived for an opera house, Atlas. Still, with its eighteen singer/performers and ten orchestra members, and premiere at the Houston Grand Opera, this is no ordinary work in the genre. In place of the conventional book there is a repertoire of vocal techniques that encompasses glottal effects, ululation, yodeling, speech song, animal sounds, and vocalization. Texture of the voice is more important than text in this opera that dances. The musical line, which overrides any sense of literary line, is inseparable from the line of the body. Atlas: an opera in threepartsevolves as continuous movement, organized in the thematic divisions of Personal Climate, Night Travel, Invisible Light. Movement joins with song in a melisma effect that characterizes the opera from the very start, generating highly emotional moments. It opens with a scene of domestic life. On one side of the wide proscenium stage of the Annenberg Center at Philadelphia, where Atlas was presented as part of the American Music Theatre Festival, there are two parents in a conventional living room setting, and at the other side is a young girl 16 in her bedroom, its window looking out to the world, a lighted globe nearby. Pictorially, the opera emphasizes this horizontality as a reflection of its internal linear movement, specifically, the work's unfolding as a journey. Warming this space of desire, lit by bright colors and framed by patterned wall paper, are the restless dreams of 13-year-old Alexandra. She gets up from her bed, cuts a wide span of the torso, in simple stretching, grasping movements that match the open vowels of her vocalizing , "la-la-la. . . ."The emphasis on vowels, here and elsewhere in the opera, enunciates its theme of travel, to inner and outer worlds. Not unlike their proliferation and effect in Monk's earlier Recent Ruins, they open wide to the air, to experience. What is a vowel but a song? Alexandra's dance is used less to give steps to a character than to create a movement pattern. This is a general principle of Atlas; one might call it figuration instead of characterization. As the scene progresses a French horn highlights the mood of travel, and the clarinet adds a certain reedy breeze to it. In contrast, the violin and cello underline the parents' worried duet; the father's anguish registering in his lower aching tones, the mother 's in the high-pitched shrills of a wounded animal. In this way, the trio of mother, father, daughter--sometimes at opposite ends of the stage, at other moments close together-is dramatized musically, through major and minor keys covering a wide range of vocal textures. The voice is choreographed as it were, the expressive content reinforced by Monk's distinctive ostinato. Some critics have interpreted the first scene as a commentary on the sterility of bourgeois life, but this interpretation distorts Monk's imagery. Scenes of home life and childhood are an essential thematics in her theatrical narrative over more than two decades; the institutional branch of her artistic company she named "The House." Monk's domestic scenes have always been cast in loving, respectful tones. In Atlas the parents appear in three scenes, two in the first section, and a third in the second section. They are also given some of the most beautiful melodies in the opera. Nonetheless, the daughter leaves this balmy climate to seek out new worlds; her search is for enlightenment, not love. The interplay of light and dark, harmony and dissonance, wisdom and ignorance filters through Atlas whose intrinsic subject is vision, the art of seeing-but only in the sense of spiritual radiance. A film (in negative) of a horse running wildly is...