Monsters of Immersion

_{"In the Arc of Your Mallet"

Courtesy of International

Production Associates Inc.}

here were many memorable moments as we traversed this labyrinth. With glasses on, we next experienced "In the Arc of Your Mallet," a rotating, severed hand with protruding, exposed veins reveals slightly curled fingers and eerily realistic fingernails. In "My Worst Habit," white bars glide across a silvery background forming a Mondrian-like composite, as though made of a viscous substance moving through an amniotic fluid. Returning to the stage, the glasses come off and the projection screen ascends. "Like This" – the music pulsating, a fire burns in a cistern, a woman gyrates her hand inside a large fish tank, another woman stands with the lower half of her body cutoff in the light, abrupt changes in lighting paint the scrim an intense red, blue, green, yellow. The screen descends again and the glasses come back on.

_{"Stereogram"

Courtesy of International Production

Associates Inc.}

"Stereogram" – two circles separate two pairs of couples in formal attire standing erect, two men on the right, two woman on the left. The couples swap so that they are paired male/female, then join together as one couple, the circles merging as one, until a comet appears in the circle. The glasses came off. "Boy Beach and Ball" – a boy is sitting downstage right, a rock moves slowly across the stage, a column is lowered, the boy crawls into the column, which then rises. With glasses on again, we came to one of the most striking scenes in the work, "They Say That Paradise Will Be Perfect," in which the camera slowly pans across mountain peaks, helicopters glide by like nightflys, lights blazing in the darkened sky, a bird emerges and flies in tandem with one of the helicopters. This scene was breathtaking in its solemn, yet playful, swinging, lilting, graceful rhythm.

Again, the glasses came off. "The New Rule" – we returned to the recurring motif of the small boy sitting in a chair, a woman enters slowly from stage left trailing a long dress, as she moves the dress stretches across the stage, tight against her body. When she arrives stage right, a man in a suit appears on stilts and positions himself within the curve of the arched dress. The woman slowly gestures with her hand, turning to the audience, then freezes. It is impossible to adequately describe the exquisiteness of this visual composition. Pure Wilson.

Thus Monsters of Grace 1.0 awkwardly stumbled upon one of the challenges facing interdisciplinary artists attempting to join the virtuality of cyberspace with the age-old medium of the stage. Can the flatness of film, even the pseudo 3D illusion of stereoscopic imaging, with its dependency on gelled glasses or more sophisticated viewing devices such as the head-mounted display, ever compete with the richness and true depth of theatrical space? Monsters, in its current state, invites us to consider the union of the human figure moving in space alongside the transparent, metamorphic and ethereal qualities of computer-generated animation.

Wilson doesn’t attempt to resolve this issue, but with the incompleteness of his current work, he definitely raises it. Monsters potentializes a set of possibilities that leads one to imagine a complete rethinking of theater through technologies that expand the boundaries of the stage, its use of language, the performer’s movement and gestural repertoire, including techniques not even hinted at in Monsters such as interactivity between the performer and the theatrical environment through media control.