MEREDITH MONK.

MEREDITH MONK JOYCE THEATER NOVEMBER 2-7, 1999 REVIEWED BY GUS SOLOMONS JR

Meredith Monk's new Magic Frequencies: a science fiction chamber opera is stubbornly low-tech, which puzzled those in her audience conditioned to the mile-a-minute pyrotechnics of so much current dance and movement theater. Not that Monk's seventy-minute work lacks space-age gadgetry: laser lights, video projections, frequency oscillator patterns. It's just that the relaxed-pace, nontechnical movement, and reed-like voices singing simple melodic motifs, are so antithetical to the cyber-fast, image-bombarding, instant gratification that live performance aspires to nowadays.

Props don't glide in and out on tracks, they're carded on and off in dim light by stagehands and performers. The dance movement is pedestrian, not technically flashy. The performance energy is easygoing. This old-fashioned, home-made staging either enthralls you--as it did me--or it makes you want to channel surf. For those with patience, however, Monk's five simple scenes for five performers and two musicians offer savory nuggets of musical and kinetic delight.

Monk and Ching Gonzalez, sitting at the kitchen table, converse musically in rhythmic nonsense syllables. Three aliens (Theo Bleckmann, Katie Geissinger, and Lanny Harrison) in four-inch platform sandals cruise behind three translucent barriers, watching, then approach to inspect the earthlings. The aliens imitate the couple, eating corn on the cob, and crunching gets amplified into a symphonic roar. This cartoon-like opening sets the mood for ensuing tableaux.

Gonzalez breathes audibly in his bed as visitors pass in and out of the room: perhaps friends, maybe strangers. Bleckmann roves the terrain of his bare torso with a bright light cupped in his hand, like an aircraft hovering over the ground. Geissinger and Bleckmann, carrying shopping bags, meet in a rectangle of light that might be an elevator--or an extra-terrestrial energy cell--and have a vocabulating musical relationship of ambiguous nature that might be romantic or not. Harrison broadcasts news items, present and future, in her own voice or lip-syncs recorded ones and twitches oddly.

In the major dance episode the performers, silhouetted in Thomas Hase's mysterious lighting, tiptoe with arms willowing overhead, paddle on their backs across the stage on dollies, and waggle their arms and legs like overgrown children in creative movement class. Allison Sniffin on violin and John Hollenbeck on electric keyboard accompany with halcyon melodies.

When the performers bring out miniature models of the scenes: kitchen, bedroom, shopping center, airport, and news desk, all the previous action is suddenly cast into a different scale in a new environment. The five now-giant humans stand beside the models chanting softly, as the sun eclipses and re-emerges. Sniffin reprises the first musical motif of the opera on a theremin--the original space-age instrument invented a half-century ago, that produces ethereal tones by moving one hand near an antenna while holding the other over a metal loop.

Monk merges past, present, and future into a thought-provoking hour and a quarter that damps the frenetic vibrations of the world we've left outside, and to which we return with our mental frequencies magically transformed.