House/Lights.

Like a physicist yearning for a grand unifying theory, Richard Wagner dreamed of a "total art" that would incorporate all disciplines. Though few other creators have been as madly ambitious, a constant cross-pollination between fields has taken art a step or two toward Wagner's ideal. Pablo Picasso designed sets for Serge Diaghilev's ballets. Choreographers like Agnes de Mille and Jerome Robbins wove dance into the fabric of musicals. And contemporary experimental theater troupes mix film and drama with impunity - as New York's outrageous Wooster Group has recently in House/Lights, a perplexing, high-tech hybrid of a cult soft-porn movie and a play by Gertrude Stein.

Revealing aspirations even more Wagnerian, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts recently kicked off a new initiative the - "New Visions" series - which aims to splice classical music, drama, and dance, in hopes of "extending the boundaries of the concert experience and creating vital new theatrical forms." This enterprise may seem a little esoteric. But it is this kind of adventurism that keeps us from taking traditional genres for granted, leading to endless stale repetitions of the tried-and-true. Even when the product of an artistic experiment is not completely satisfying in itself, the process of mounting or viewing it may spark new ideas that we can use when working on more mainstream fare. It is important to keep testing boundaries. After all, if Shakespeare had stuck to the dramatic rules of his time - limiting a play's scope to a single setting and a single twenty-four hour period - wouldn't our theater be poorer?

Lincoln Center's new interdisciplinary series, which will be an ongoing program, made its debut in January with Moondrunk, a concert-meets-dream ballet fantasia in which dancers, whirling amid heaps of purple dust bunnies, gave kinesthetic expression to Arnold Schoenberg's eerie vocal work Pierrot lunaire.

Following up on this whimsical montage, "New Visions" has since mounted a bardic recitation of the Beowulf epic, in its original Anglo-Saxon, and a dramatization of Gustav Mahler's Kindertotenlieder song cycle.

"Essentially we're creating a whole new programming genre," remarks Jane Moss, the Lincoln Center vice-president for programming who dreamed up the series. Her motive, she says, was creative, rather than economic. "New Visions'" imaginative line-up may indeed attract ticket buyers who would steer clear of no-frills Schoenberg, but, according to Moss, Lincoln Center aims principally to create new art works, drawing from both the "wonderful vitality" of American theater and the "depth of repertory and talent" in classical music circles.

Safety First! - the maxim of many impresarios these days (witness Disney's staged versions of animated blockbusters) - has no place in the "New Visions" project. Benjamin Bagby's half-sung, half-spoken solo version of Beowulf, for example, sounds like a downright risky proposition. The show's scope may extend merely to the epic's first 800 lines (in which the eponymous hero vanquishes the monster Grendel), but your average concertgoer, these days, is shaky in Anglo-Saxon, and the six-stringed medieval lyre, the instrument Bagby used for accompaniment and musical flourishes, is not the most versatile instrument.

But Bagby, co-director of the ancient music ensemble Sequentia, turned out to be a mesmerizing performer. Perched on a chair with his lyre on his lap, he sang, chanted, and orated his way through the tale - the decimation of King Hrothgar's court, the arrival of the cocksure Beowulf, the battle, and Grendel's death - animating his delivery and facial expression to suit each passage. Relaying a drunken braggart's inept mockery of Beowulf, for example, Bagby let his eyes go cross-eyed and his diction slur, furnishing a moment of comic relief. At other times, his brow furrowed and an almost hypnotic solemnity crept into his voice, racheting up suspense even for an audience that was following along with an English translation.

Thanes, battle shafts, mead cups, ring carved prows and all, the saga reclaimed the immediacy it must have had when it was first composed, sometime between the sixth and the eleventh centuries. But Bagby's recital was not absorbing in the same way that other high-quality performing arts events are. Watching him, you were always aware that you were watching. You noticed the plaintive, almost oriental sound of the harp's chords as they hit your ears, and you relished the Anglo-Saxon words that were obvious precursors of English ones. You felt yourself paused in time's corridor, and you could almost glimpse the listeners centuries away from you, enjoying the same epic from the lips of the original bards.

In fact, Beowulf seemed to be about process as much as product - Bagby's sprightly turn as a minstrel encouraged audiences to think about time and interpretation. Other New Visions offerings so far have revealed a similar dynamic. Moondrunk's first half - Brahms and Schoenberg chamber pieces a Strauss waltz, a spooky shadow-play enactment of Goethe's Erlkonig - was a miniature music-appreciation course, designed to help listeners understand the fin-de-siecle Viennese culture that produced Pierrot lunaire.

And in the dramatization of Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, renowned Canadian director Robert Lepage, collaborating with soprano Rebecca Blankenship, turned a lena on our very personal rapport with our artistic heritage. The multi-medium for Lepage's message was a stilted and mawkish drama, cobbled together by British poet Blake Morrison to showcase Mahler's song, cycle - a setting of German poet Friedrich Ruckert's anguished poems about the death of his children in the 1830s. Morrison's soap opera focuses on a divorced, pregnant singer (played by Blankenship) whose young daughter has recently died; while preparing for a concert some months after the sad event, the singer discovers that Mahler's music is an emotional minefield.

This patently artificial narrative framework, which allowed Blankenship to perform songs in character, did produce a poignant layering effect. The fictional tragedy in the playlet mirrored the real tragedy of Rnckert, whose lyrics are heart-rending ("I'd never have let them out in the wind and rain like this" begins one stanza, "Now they're out there nonetheless./I was not consulted when they went.") Meanwhile, the music seemed to demonstrate how easily art and sympathy can bridge time - Mahler's melodies and harmonies, sweeping through the theater while supertitles relayed Morrison's translation of the verse, established a direct connection between the listeners and a composer who died in 1911.

At its best, the play used visual effects to emphasize the mystery of artistic communication. At one point, a row of shelves grew transparent, revealing the ghostly figure of Mahler walking along a ship deck. Later, lightning flashed from the inside of a cupboard, suggesting that a terrifying energy had been unleashed.

Unfortunately, the colloquial dialogue in the more realistic scenes - between the singer and her ex-husband (Tony Guilfoyle) as they argued about dividing up their books, for example - substantially diluted the eerie atmosphere. An equally annoying feature was the script's tendency to batter the audience with the subtext, as when the singer summed up her Kindertotenlieder foray with the observation, "I was trying to find a short cut through my grief."

Such moments made the play an encumbrance on Mahler's score rather than an amplification; as they straggled out of the theater, audience members might have been forgiven for concluding, as Friedrich Nietzsche did, that "music is the true idea of the cosmos, drama but a reflection of that idea."

Can music and drama - or any of the other creative disciplines - really fuse in a "total art"? So far the "New Visions" productions haven't answered the question one way or the other, but the series does invite us to examine how we appropriate art from the past and mine it for meaning.

[INCOMPLETE TEXT FROM ORIGINAL PUBLICATION]