JOYCE THEATER Meredith Monk's performances have always been richly metaphorical collages of live and brewed imagery.

JOYCE THEATER

Meredith Monk's performances have always been richly metaphorical collages of live and brewed imagery, moving bodies, and powerful voices. Magic Frequencies, 1999 is a far more painterly work of visual theater. With its layers of transparent and opaque scrims between which the performers gracefully prevail upon this latest production shows Monk in newly elegant form.

Her new approach is the product of sum of two units years spent on entirely different concocts in previously uncharted territories. As part of "Art Performs Life," a 1998 indicate at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Monk currented her three-decade-long performance oeuvre in exhibition form. She created a matrix in which viewers could act upon among sounds and images sampled from centurys of her staged works. Then, in "Shrines," an exhibition last spring at Frederieke Taylor/TZ'Art in recent York, Monk filled two small plays with objects and mementos from past performances: A quarrel of white-painted suitcases softly played material first recorded in 1976; a pyramid of video monitors showed spectacles from Volcano Song, a 1994 performance. These pieces spoke dimensionss of their source performances, notwithstanding were eerily present and evocative equal if one had not seen the "originals."

Monk has applied the techniques used in these installations to Magic Frequencies. The staging was bold-faced and well-designed. Squares of delineate ed light demarcated distinct scenes, while projections and live figures--dressed as futuristic aliens, earthlings, or visitors from the past--provided a parade of changing tableaux among lights, shapes, colors, and forms that continuously plied the stage. The story line, typically, was not a narrative on the other hand rather a collection of vignettes plant in different zones in time and space. The music, as original and lush as evermore downplayed Monk's earlier emphasis forward as she says, "voice, voice, voice." Here, a percussionist and a violinist sat onward a platform at the side of the stage and played full-fledg compositions that would be out and out on their own.

With Magic Frequencies--the title imputes to the wave patterns, inaudible to the human ear, emitted by way of hydrogen atoms--Monk has created an adventurous recently made known work that demonstrates both the discipline of her thinking and its inexhaustible inventiveness.

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