“The best things can’t be told,” Joseph Campbell used to quote his mentor, the great Sanskrit scholar Heinrich Zimmer. “The second best are misunderstood.” The third best, Campbell would add, “are history, biography, psychology, the sciences, etc., etc.”
To Campbell and Zimmer the “best” were mysteries of the spirit and the impenetrable world of God. Theatre for most of its modern career has concentrated on the “third best,” for most of its ancient history on the second (myth); but in the year 2000 season, performing artists on and off the festival circuit have been telling and Telling and Telling the Untellable. This was the year in which Robert Wilson created an installation of the Stations of the Cross on the grounds of the Oberammergau Passion Play. This was the year in which John Moran, known for his multimedia pop culture operas (The Jack Benny Program, The Manson Family) gave us the Buddhist-inspired Book of the Dead (Second Avenue). And this was the year in which the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave, that venerable bellwether of the New, turned mightily to the Spirit.
Fully half of BAM’s 2000 Next Wave offerings were spiritual in ways that would have been unthinkable in both senses—unable to be thought, and faintly scandalous if thought out loud—in the early years of the festival. In those days (early to mid-’80s) Next Wave meant art uncontaminated by some legible meaning—high modern, not late romantic. There was no better way to do high modern than pure movement, and the emphasis was heavily on dance, along with the occasional high-tech, non-narrative performance piece.
In the later ’80s came the next wave of the Next Wave. Choreographers like Pina Bausch and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker did meaning like mad, but also madly, expressionistically. The political moment continued with Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s Gringostroika piece and Bill T. Jones’s Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Even if some of the work had overt spiritual content (Ping Chong’s Swedenborg’s Angels), it was read in the context of the Next Wave’s primary commitment: the introduction (or perhaps one should say the ratification) of the New.
So it was startling this past season to see what a different cultural moment we have arrived at. The dedication to spirituality announced, if announcement were needed, that the “avant-garde” of abstract form is so long gone that even its phantom limb has dropped off. Thus has BAM slid from the New to the Eternal, a theme perhaps already hinted by the revival last spring of Kurt Weill’s Old Testament pageant The Eternal Road (may it rest in peace and not revive again).
This festival was given over to the contemplation of first and last things—birth, death, enlightenment, inner peace, the origin and destiny of the world. The five large-scale works of the festival were all in this genre, as was Eiko and Koma’s moving chamber work When Nights Were Dark. First came Philip Glass’s immense Symphony No. 5: Requiem, Bardo, Nirmanakaya, whose libretto, chosen with the aid of professional religious consultants, was drawn from a variety of sacred texts—the Rig-Veda, Genesis, African creation myths, the Koran, the poetry of Rumi, the Bhagavad Gita, Matthew, Corinthians, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and more. This 12-movement, 100-minute choral symphony, inviting comparison to Beethoven’s Ninth, may be the only orchestral work whose program notes include a bibliography with literary credits. Its movements follow a cosmic arc from Creation to Last Judgment, Apocalypse and Paradise. In between are movement-long meditations on such universal themes as “Love and Joy” and “Suffering.”
Next came the Chorus Repertory Theatre of the northeastern Indian state of Manipur with Uttar Priyadarshi (The Final Beatitude). The visit of director Ratan Thiyam’s fabled group, its remote home theatre long a pilgrimage site of theatre artists from the West, was the culmination of a U.S. tour arranged by the Asia Society. The piece tells of the enlightenment of the warlike 2nd-century B.C.E. Emperor Ashoka, who takes refuge in the teachings of the Buddha as he comes to understand the evils of war and their roots in his own nature.
The Cloud Gate Dance Theatre offered another version of Buddhist enlightenment. In the Taiwanese choreographer Lin Hwai-min’s Songs of the Wanderers, gnarled human figures representing all humanity struggle towards the river of life (a curving ribbon of golden rice grains) and enact the human drama of birth, death and rebirth. A Buddhist monk figure stands motionless outside this world of impermanence and illusion for 90 minutes, his hands in prayer, while a continuous “waterfall” of rice rains down on his shaven head.
At a dialogue on “Art and Spirituality” presented by BAM’s Education and Humanities Department, the luminous Mr. Lin acknowledged his reputation as “the Buddhist choreographer.” He described the powerful effect on his work of a trip to India, where he saw the living and the dead commingled in the waters of the Ganges, and monks praying at the seat of the Buddha’s enlightenment next to the outstretched hands of beggars. American choreographer Ralph Lemon discussed his own Zen meditation practice and his earlier history as a Jehovah’s Witness as inspiration for his utopian Geography trilogy, a worldwide search for a foundation for art outside of western formalism. For Tree, part two of the series, which premiered at the Yale Repertory Theatre before coming to BAM, Lemon traveled throughout Asia seeking performers of traditional music and dance forms to join Africans from the Ivory Coast and African Americans in an onstage world performance community.
And then there was Strindberg’s vaguely Hindu, vaguely Buddhist, partly Christian meditation on human existence, A Dream Play, with its keening refrain, “Mankind is to be pitied.” Writing of A Dream Play in the New York Times before the BAM opening, Eric Bentley described it very simply as religious drama. I’ll return presently to its incarnation in the hands of Robert Wilson and the stunningly accomplished Stockholm Stadsteater.
This programming represented a radical departure from all the stances of art late-century audiences have been accustomed to: pure form, ironic distance, expressionistic overload. What does it mean? Was this an accidental convergence that became a packaging theme? Or…. Will there be no more cakes and ale? Is it later than we think?
Even though the Glass symphony was a millennium commission from the Salzburg Festival, one should not under-estimate the mythic power of this tick of the calendar. “Millennium,” or its symptom millennialism, as explained by the academic Millennial Studies people (a major growth industry of the past decade, now deflating), is much more than a thousand-year calendar date. It is an intermittently striking mythic determination—perhaps seizure is a better word—to make the world anew, cleansed of impurities. Such movements can be triggered off by wars, social and political upheaval, natural calamities and, quite reliably, by the ends of centuries, even if they don’t coincide with a millennial passage.
The last time we saw this kind of artist flight—whether as retreat or ascent is a question that can divide nations—to the Eternal was at and around the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries. The 2000 Next Wave season could be read in fact like a time warp back to fin-de-siecle Paris. There millennial anticipation played a role in the religious, often mystical, enthusiasm that gripped artistic circles. The artists of the first avant-garde, the symbolist movement, were “into” the spiritual journey, as we would say today: Swedenborg, two competing schools of Rosicrucianism, Buddhism, the Catholic revival and, above all, Theosophy, shortly to be joined by Anthroposophy, were bundled together under the rubric of “occult.” Strindberg, living in Paris in the 1890s, pursued most of them. An accomplished chemist, he also attempted to make gold from base elements in his Paris hotel room, publishing the results in occult alchemical journals. It was shortly after this period that he began to write in the new form he came to call the “dream play.”
The millennial stirrings I describe are different from the violently apocalyptic type that would scour the world by blood. Though Alfred Jarry did have rotten old Ubu stand in for the Antichrist in his 1895 Caesar Antichrist, and Artaud later sounded the apocalyptic trumpet in The Spurt of Blood, most symbolists strove to create a silent, contemplative world in touch with the Infinite. Strindberg reports from 1890s Paris that he was seeing “young men don the monk’s cowl…dream of the monastery, write legends, perform miracle plays, paint Madonnas, and model Christs.” Mallarme himself, the undisputed center of the symbolist movement, called on the theatre to replace vaudeville with “Mystere.” Meyerhold heard the call in Russia while directing Maeterlinck for the first time. “A performance of Maeterlinck is a mystery,” he wrote, “Either there is a barely audible harmony of voices…or there is an ecstasy which is transformed into a universal religious festival.” The American writer Sadakichi Hartmann, Bohemian poet, art critic and social commentator, went to Paris to sit at the feet of Mallarme, caught the fever, and between 1889 and 1897 wrote three Wagnerian cosmic dramas: Christ, Buddha and Confucius.
So did BAM’s turn to the eternal bode well for art? I’ll speak only about the two most theatrical offerings on the program, Thiyam’s Uttar Priyadarshi and Strindberg’s A Dream Play. Both concern the struggle to attain wisdom through a difficult journey. In Uttar Priyadarshi Ashoka must go through hell, literally and psychologically, before he can renounce war and achieve the enlightenment of the Buddha. Strindberg’s Daughter of Indra descends from heaven to explore the purgatory of illusions, burdens and aspirations that is life on earth. She cannot bring enlightenment to the sufferers she meets, but offers a kind of promissory note that points the way. She bids mankind farewell in a spectacular ending that includes a bonfire of the vanities and a burning castle whose rooftop ornament blossoms into a great chrysanthemum, Strindberg’s version of the Buddha’s thousand-petalled lotus.
Both works were stunningly performed. In the exquisite discipline of Thiyam’s troupe, Robert Wilson has met his match. Wilson himself has never looked better than with the actors of the Stockholm municipal theatre, especially those elongated men, who seem to have been born to angle into his precise geometries. But considered as millenarian works, works about human transformation, what a difference!
In the state of Manipur, claimed by India 50 years ago at the time of the partition, Thiyam and his performers have carved out a theatre against (and even from) war, internal rebellion and poverty. Their theatre building was destroyed by floods; they rebuilt it with their own hands. When Thiyam says that Uttar Priyadarshi is his contribution to peace in the world, he is not speaking of calm (much less of a theatre becalmed, which was one effect of Wilson’s Dream Play) but of the most urgent need for detachment from anger and revenge. It is his prayer for the new century. Despite its universal theme, however, Uttar Priyardarshi was received by BAM audiences with detachment of another kind. They were puzzled by the skimpy subtitles, the droning Buddhist monks and perhaps by Thiyam’s unvarnished sincerity of purpose. I myself connected far more deeply with the performance on the second viewing than the first. Spiritual education requires work.
Wilson has been addressing the millennial moment for the past three years, though it is not clear that it actually interests him. The Day Before: death, destruction and detroit III, performed at Lincoln Center in the summer of 1999, was originally to be based on a compilation of apocalyptic texts, most centrally the Book of Revelation, but ended up with a text almost entirely carved from the Umberto Eco novel The Island of the Day Before. This was presented in a droning recitation by Fiona Shaw, which accompanied some extraordinary stage effects created when apocalypse was still the focus of the piece. Watching A Dream Play, I remembered one such effect in particular, a growing, exploding orange horizon, and wondered where it was now, when we needed it. For Wilson’s Dream Play was curiously, determinedly, enclosed—the most enclosed Wilson staging I can recall. This was a landscape without a horizon, and in a play of Dream Play‘s cosmic scope, that must mean something. Or does it?
I imagine Wilson thought there was no need to replicate the text. If Strindberg has the Daughter of Indra fall to earth from heaven through heavy ethers and noxious vapors, then that’s been said in the supertitles: Why stage it? Wilson will have her enter down a diagonal tamp alongside a staircase under repair in a grand turn-of-the-century house. The seen scene is of three craftsmen in aprons performing repetitive motions with woodworking tools. If the Daughter of Indra takes her third and most enlightened companion, Strindberg’s Poet, to the “wilderness” of Fingal’s Cave, facing the open sea, Wilson will stage the entire scene against a brick wall that runs across the stage from floor to flies. And if Strindberg’s final stage directions call for a transforming stage effect of fire and light, Wilson will return to real estate and repeat the first scene with the ramp—a curious visual trope, as repetition is one form of the hell of human life that Strindberg most excoriates. It is of course no surprise to encounter a radical separation of scene and text in Wilson. Yet it is a Wilson adage that “Theatre must be about One Big Thing; then it can be about many little things.” Big things cried out for expression from the Dream Play text; on the stage, little things prevailed, gorgeous though they were.
There were immense visual pleasures here, but on the great reckoning of human existence—ours now, or Strindberg’s 100 years ago—Wilson, Oberammergau notwithstanding, seemed to have reflected little. I suppose we could make an allegory of inconsequentiality and conclude that no message is the message, that there are no “best things” to tell, or perhaps that beauty is the best there is. Leave transcendence to great directors from the “developing world” who still harbor naive hope of personal and world transformation; let the masters of the global circuit generate dreams without a dream.
Having cycled hack to the spiritual themes that presided over the birth of modernism (recall Kandinsky’s famous treatise “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” that aligned geometric abstraction with spiritual transcendence), it will be interesting to see where the Next Wave goes from here. In keeping with the Buddha’s great teaching of impermanence, it is a fair guess that this moment will not last (and also that it will eternally recur). But this turn to first principles and “best things”—even if they can be neither told nor heard—creates a new space of experiment for America’s most enduring performing arts festival. Anything can be “next” now, including the oldest things there are.
Elinor Fuchs is the author of The Death of Character (Indiana University Press) and a frequent contributor to this magazine.
