Meditation at 24 Frames Per Minute
In a lecture preceding the opening performance, the creators described the show as a kind of meditation. The animation itself is in extreme slow motion, so slow that one wonders if it is really moving at all. It's more like 24 frames per minute than the film speed of 24 frames per second. But as time progresses, scenes change and new views become apparent. The imagery is abstract in meaning, seemingly random in placement, yet hyper-realistic in its portrayal of real objects. A little boy rides a bicycle past glowing houses at dusk. A severed hand opens its fist and is sliced by a floating blade. A Japanese tea tray floats in mid-air and turns into television static. A sleeping polar bear is caressed by a child's hand. A helicopter and a bird fly over the Great Wall of China. And in a dramatically different scene, multicolored lines move gracefully across the screen like a motion painting by Oskar Fischinger. What does it all mean? This, according to creators, is open to the viewer's interpretation. "The visuals are simply to help us listen to the music," said Robert Wilson, "Hopefully with this parallelism, the two elements can reinforce one another without having to decorate or illustrate." Philip Glass, who incorporated English translations of Sufi poetry into the music, said that any apparent cooperation of the images and the lyrics are purely coincidental. He said, "The words don't illustrate. If they do it's by accident."

Art for the People
"I consider Monsters of Grace to be 21st century theater," said Jedediah Wheeler, the show's producer, "[it] will appeal to a new generation of theater audiences who may not be familiar with the work of Glass or Wilson, but who will be excited by the digital process." With this in mind, Monsters of Grace is being brought not only to the cosmopolitan cities where Glass and Wilson's work is well-known (London, Munich), but also to areas which do not often see experimental theater works, such as Columbus, Ohio; Madison, Wisconsin; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Iowa City, Iowa; Lubbock, Texas and Tempe, Arizona. Ultimately, after all film production is complete, plans call for Monsters of Grace to exist in purely digital form as a CD-Rom, DVD piece, 3-D enhanced web site or VR installation. Currently, Monsters of Grace information and show dates are available on the web site, www.extremetaste.com.

Wendy Jackson is associate editor of Animation World Magazine.

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