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onsters was first conceived five years ago in a series of workshops at Wilson’s rural retreat in Watermill, NY, where the artist lives and breathes his collaborative ventures each summer in this monastery-like setting. A year later, the notion of rendering computer imagery sprang from the imagination of Jed Wheeler, who had just completed a recent production of the Wilson / Glass music theater work Einstein on the Beach, and had his own vision of a theater for the next millennium.
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"I was struck," Wheeler explained, "with the conventions of stagecraft, imagining the size of the truck we would need on tour. Diana [Walczek] was inviting me to think of something completely new. The more I talked to her, the more I realized we weren’t talking about duplicating the experience of theater but of exploding its confines. It dawned on me that technology had caught up with Bob Wilson." | |||
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Stymied by the impracticality of staging and touring a monumental new work by Wilson and Glass, Wheeler proposed a digital mis-en-scene, one that could be projected as a 3D stereoscopic cinematic experience accompanied by the live music of the Philip Glass Ensemble. Glass had recently been touring works for live music and film, the Jean Cocteau films Beauty and the Beast and Les Enfants Terribles. Joining live performance and projected computer animation must have seemed a natural extension at the time. Glass was enthusiastic about the idea but warned, "I was a little apprehensive about the computer imagery being too cold and I wanted something passionate and human." As emotive counterpoint to the hard edged, Cartesian quality of digital media, Glass chose a libretto based on the 13th-century love songs of Jalauddin Rumi, the Turkish religious scholar who is known as the original whirling dervish. | ||
| Four years of research, discussion, prototypes and experimentation followed. By early 1998, Kleiser and Walczak had a staff of 20 artists working out of three facilities in New York, Massachusetts, and Hollywood with over 100 computers rendering imagery 24 hours a day, transferring the footage to 70mm film. In the final phase of production, Wilson insisted on numerous changes to the animation, typical of the theater director whose obsession for perfection could require a thousand hours of rehearsal for lighting alone. Despite the awesome technological forces of Kleiser-Walczak’s battery of SGI computers, there was not enough time to complete the 13 scenes of Monsters of Grace for the Los Angeles premiere. Kleiser complained, "In a theater you can just tell some actors to do it and they do. For us, that represents three or four months of hard labor." | |||
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