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NEWS RELEASE

Brooklyn Academy of Music presents the New York premiere of and Robert Wilson's Monsters of Grace, an innovative digital opera in three dimensions

Music by Philip Glass Visual concept by Robert Wilson Lyrics by Jalaluddin Rumi , translated and adapted by Coleman Barks , sung in English Visual Realization & Computer Animation by Kleiser-Walczak Construction Company Executive Producer Jedediah Wheeler BAM co-commission

BAM Opera House Thirteen performances: December 9*-12, 15-19 at 7:30pm; December 12 & 19 at 2pm; December 13 & 20 at 3pm (* Monster s of Grace Gala will be held on December 9) tickets : $45, 30, 15 (including 3-D glasses)

Brooklyn, November 16, 1998 (Revised)-Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) presents the New York premiere of composer Philip Glass and director /designer Robert Wilson's Monsters of Grace, a digital opera in three dimensions . Melding high a.rt and high technology , this Next Wave Festival production combines a computer-animated 70mm format film with live music and vocals ; lyrics (sung in English) are drawn from the spiritual poetry of 13th century Persian mystic Jalaluddin Rumi . This BAM co-commission marks the first performances of Monsters of Grace in which all thirteen scenes are fully animated . The production will receive thirteen performances at the BAM Opera House (30 Lafayette A venue , Brooklyn) between December 9-20. The Next Wave Festival , comprised of sixteen dance , music , and theater events , is sponsored by Philip Morris Companies Inc. For tickets , call BAM Ticket Services at 718.636.4100. BAM Prefers Visa® .

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BAM Next Wave Festivaland Spring Seasonare sponsoredby Philip MorrisCompanies Inc. Monsters, page 2

About Monsters of Grace and the poetry of Rumi

Monsters of Grace is a new and continually evolving work by composer Philip Glass and stage director/designer Robert Wilson. Using advanced cinematic and stereoscopic animation technologies, this groundbreaking production explores the unlimited possibilities and enigmatic interplay of light, sound and objects. BAM's 13-performance engagement features a three­ dimensional, computer-animated 70mm format film accompanied by live music and a quartet of voices. According to Wilson, "I'm not giving you puzzles to solve, only pictures to hear. You go to our opera like you go to a museum."

Monsters of Grace is scored for amplified voices, woodwinds, keyboards , Macintosh computers, MIDI interface and custom-designed sampled Persian and other Middle-Eastern string and percussion instruments . Performed live by the and four vocalists , Monsters of Grace is a radical departure from the creative team's 1976 landmark opera, , seen at BAM in 1984 and 1992.

The lyrics for Monsters of Grace are based on the 13th century poetry of Jalaluddin Rumi, one of the world's great poets and mystics who is credited as the original whirling dervish. Glass commented: "What interested me about Rumi's poetry is that it is really a collection of love songs. Devotional or romantic , they describe the transformation of the ordinary world into the realm of the spiritual."

Audience members will view Monsters of Grace through special polarized lenses with frames designed by l.a.Eyeworks. The 68-minute production "offers what could be a glimpse of 21st century music theater-if we' re lucky ... a sumptuous play of images, color and movement, supported by the unearthly glory of one of Glass' most affecting scores," commented San Francisco Chronicle) on the "beta" version premiere last April.

About the animation process

Monsters of Grace was originally conceived as a "conventional" stage production. When Wilson's visions of helicopters , polar bears and gigantic hands began to exceed physical and economic limitations, Jeff Kleiser and Diana Walczak , directors of Kleiser-Walczak Construction Company , creators of the special effects in the films Stargate, Judge Dredd and Clear and Present Danger, joined the creative team to render Wilson's design into 3-D,

... more Monsters , pag e 3 computer-generated images. The technology enabling Monsters of Grace includes Alias[Wavefront software running on OS2 graphics workstations from Silicon Graphics computers (famous for the digital dinosaurs in the movie Jurassic Park). While the first performances of the work in Los Angeles last April featured eight animated scenes and five staged scenes, all thirteen scenes of Monsters of Grace will be fully animated at the BAM engagement, fulfilling Glass ' and Wilson ' s original intention. Running 68 minutes , Monsters of Grace will be the longest computer generated stereoscopic film ever produced .

Each of the thirteen scenes in Monsters of Grace was realized by a team of at least three artisans. After the art department finalized the storyboards, a modeler was assigned to "build" the elements of the scene using the computer software tools most suited for the task. An animator then used the completed models to execute- within the parameters of computer technology-the desired action of the scene. The final step of this process was to light the sequence as though it were a traditionally staged scene, with the added challenge of creating depth , colors and textures which would occur naturally in the real world. Depending upon the complexity of the scene, the process took from four to twelve weeks to complete.

Jedediah Wheeler , the show's executive producer , said: "Monsters of Grace does what I want all theater to do: it challenges preconceptions and subverts conventional wisdom. The journey from inception to performance produced new ways of working that married the most advanced technology of our time with the esthetic vision of Philip Glass and Robert Wilson. In a wonderful way, the Sufi poetry of Rumi, with its lessons of unfolding enlightenment , are well suited to "the process as performance " of our computer age. Who knew?"

BAMdialogue with Jeff Kleiser and Diana Walczak Thursday , December 10 at 5:30pm BAM Richard Alan Hillman Attic Studio tickets : $8

Film and computer animators Jeff Kleiser and Diana Walczak demonstrate the animation techniques used in creating the 3-D film Monsters a/Grace.

An initiative of BAM Education and Humanities , BAMdialogues (sponsor ed by AT&T) are public conversations with artists and cultural commentators .

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Monsters of Grace Gala on December 9

The Monsters of Grace Gala will be held in conjunction with the opening performance on December 9. Sponsored by Philip Morris Companies Inc., the event will benefit BAM and Top Shows Inc. For Gala information , please call 718.636.4174. For a Gala press release , please call BAM Press at 718.636.4129.

About the creative team

Philip Glass, an iconoclast among American composers, applied his research in India, North Africa and the Himalayas to his own work and, by 1974, had created a large body of work in a distinct idiom. Much of his early work was used by the Mabou Mines theater company , which he co-founded , and most of it was intended for his own performing group, the Philip Glass Ensemble. This period reached its apogee with Einstein on the Beach, a landmark in 20th century music-theater. Glass ' output since that groundbreaking work has ranged from opera, to film score, to dance music , to symphonic work, to string quartets, to such unclassifiable theater work as and 1000 Airplanes on the Roof Recent work includes Heroes, a ballet symphony for Twyla Tharp ; Les Enfants Terribles: Children of the Game, a dance opera spectacle, choreographed by Susan Marshall and performed at BAM in 1996; , commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera; and the Third Symphony, premiered by the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra. Additional works performed at BAM include ( 1981 ); the world premieres of Low Symphony, first performed in 1992 and later recorded by the Brooklyn Philharmonic , and Second Symphony (1994); revivals of Einstein on the Beach in 1984 and 1992; and the New York premieres of Orphee ( 1993) and La Belle et La Bete ( 1994 ), two parts of his operatic trilogy based on the work of Jean Cocteau. Glass' recent work includes White Raven with Robert Wilson, a new composition for the Rascher Saxophone Quartet ; and The Witches of Venice, a new ballet created by Beni Montresor, commissioned by Teatro alla Scala . In 1995, Glass was made a Chevalier de l 'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.

Robert Wilson , a native of Waco , Texas, was acknowledged as one of the leading figures in Manhattan's avant-garde theater world by the late 1960s. His association with BAM dates back to 1969 when he presented The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud (offered again by BAM in 1970). Following the 1971 Paris debut of Wilson 's breakthrough Deajman Glance (performed at BAM in 1971 ), Louis Aragon wrote

... more Monsters , pag e 5 a letter to Andre Breton claiming that "I have never seen anything more beautiful in the world." Following Deafman Glance, Wilson presented a number of influential productions, including the seven-day play KA MOUNTain and GUARDenia Terrace (1972); The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, a 12-hour silent opera performed in 1973; The$ Value of Man (seen at BAM at 1975); and finally his landmark Einstein on the Beach (1976 , mounted at BAM in 1984 and 1992). After Einstein, Wilson worked increasingly in state -supported European theaters where he created a number of exemplary productions, including the twelve-act, multi-media epic, the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down (Act V-The Rome Section was performed at BAM in 1986). Created in collaboration with an international group of artists and intended for inclusion in the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival in Europe, the opera is considered Wilson's most ambitious project to date. In addition to adaptations of opera and other playwrights ' works, recent projects include Four Saints in Three Acts (1996) and a solo adaptation of Shakespeare's Hamlet , performed internationally by Wilson himself. Wilson is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowship, including two Rockefeller and two Guggenheim fellowships, a Bessie Award, an Obie Award and a Drama Desk Award . In 1986, Wilson was the sole nominee for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for the CIVIL warS. Other BAM presentations include The Golden Windows (1985) , The Forest (1988), The Black Rider ( 1993 ), Alice ( 1995), and Time Rocker ( 1997).

Kleiser-Walczak Construction Company (KWCC) is a full -spectrum production company which specializes in high-end computer animation for feature films, TV , commercials, theme park attractions, and educational and artistic projects. Under the direction of partners Jeff Kleiser and Diana Walczak, KWCC has produced groundbreaking animations and imagery for a multitude of high-profile projects including the Columbia Pictures logo, the feature films Stargate , Clear and Present Danger and Judge Dredd, and location -based entertainment ride films for Luxor Hotel , Las Vegas, and a much anticipated high-tech ride for Universal's Spiderman attraction, opening in Orlando, Florida in early 1999. The company specializes in the creation of life-like computer characters, which they call Synthespians™. Beginning with the initial design work, then moving on to the sculpting and digitizing phases , these computer -generated characters are brought to life within Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) workstations with state-of-the-art graphics software .

Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-1273) lived in south central Anatolia (Konya, Turkey). He is one of the world's great poets and mystics and is credited to be the original whirling

... more Monsters, pag e 6 dervish. Part of a long lineage of scholars , jurists and theologians, Rumi led a fairly normal life as a religious scholar until, at the age of 37, his life changed when he met a wandering dervish, Shams of Tabriz. "What I thought of before as god, I met today as a person ," Rumi is reported to have said about his new friend. Through Shams , Rumi discovered the inner Friend , the soul, the Beloved , constant reminders of God 's presence. Rumi began the transformation into a mystical artist- writing poetry , listening to music, singing and whirling hour after hour . Rumi's poetry was created as part of a constant, practical and mysterious discourse with this dervish-learning community . The focus changed from stern to ecstatic, from everyday to esoteric as the needs of the group arose. Poetry, music and movement were parts of that communal and secretly individual work of opening hearts and exploring the mystery of union of the divine. The poetry comprising the lyrics of Monsters of Grace has been translated from the original Persian by Coleman Barks, the premier translator of Rumi at work today.

Jedediah Wheeler, executive producer, is president of International Production Associates, Inc. (IPA), the theatrical management and production company he formed in 1982 to sustain the work of artists whose creative vision is singular and challenges categorization, including Philip Glass and Ushio Amagatsu (Sankai Juku) . He is also the founder of Top Shows, Inc., a not-for-profit company dedicated to exploring new entrepreneurial models for producing risk-taking performance work. In 1987, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts invited him to create and produce a new performance festival called Serious Fun!; it became an annual event for which he won an OBIE Award for Outstanding Achievement in 1992. He is credited with producing Le Cirque Imaginaire (1986), the Knee Plays by Robert Wilson and David Byrne (1986) , 1000 Airplanes on the Roof by Philip Glass, David Henry Hwang and Jerome Sirlin (1988) , by Philip Glass and Allen Ginsburg (1990) , Einstein on the Beach (1992), The Mysteries and What 's So Funny ? by David Gordon and Red Grooms (1992), La Belle et la Bete by Philip Glass based on the film by Jean Cocteau (1994), and Les Enfants Terribles by Philip Glass and Susan Marshall ( 1996). Recent productions include Tharp! by Twyla Tharp, Pearls for Pigs by Richard Foreman , The Wasteland performed by Fiona Shaw and directed by Deborah Warner for which he won a New York Drama Desk Award , and 2.5 Minut e Ride by Lisa Kron and directed by Mark Brokaw , which will appear at the Public Theater in March 1999. A graduate of Tulane University , Wheeler is a member of the board of directors of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters , and was co-chair of its 1998 annual conference .

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Production credits for Monsters of Grace, a BAM co-commission Music by Philip Glass Visual Concept by Robert Wilson Lyrics by Jalaluddin Rumi, Translated and Adapted from the Original by Coleman Barks Visual Realization & Computer Animation by Kleiser-Walczak Construction Company Film Direction by Diana Walczak and JeffKleiser Design Consultant Giuseppe Frigeni Sound design by Kurt Munkacsi Music Director Performed by Philip Glass and the Philip Glass Ensemble with Vocalists Producers Linda Greenberg and Jedediah Wheeler Executive Producer Jedediah Wheeler

Credits

The Monsters of Grace project is produced by International Production Associates , Inc ., in association with Top Shows Inc., with funding from the AT&T Foundation, I.a. Eyeworks , OPERA America and Mr. & Mrs . Sidney Lewis .

The work has been co-commissioned by the UCLA Center for the Performing Arts , Arizona State University Public Events, The Barbican Centre, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Change Performing Arts, Festival Castell de Peralada, Het Muziektheater, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA), The Society for the Performing Arts (Houston) and Wolf Trap Foundation.

Major support for this BAM presentation has been provided by The Ford Foundation to support collaborative creativity among U.S. artists. This production of Monsters of Gra ce received funding from OPERA America 's The Next Stage. The Next Stag e is funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation , The James Irvine Foundation, AT&T Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. The Next Wave Festival is sponsored by Philip Morris Companies Inc. New York Marriott Brooklyn is the official hotel of BAM. Bloomberg Radio is the official broadcast sponsor of BAM.

General Information

BAM is located at 30 Lafayette Avenue (Lafayette and Ashland) in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn. Food and beverages by Michael Ayoub are available at the BAMcafe, with service from noon to I 0pm .

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Subway: 2, 3, 4, 5, D, Q to Atlantic Avenue B, M, N, R to Pacific Street G to Fu Iton Street Long Island Railroad to Flatbush A venue BAMbus: departs from Whitney Museum at Philip Morris, 120 Park Avenue at 42nd Street, one hour prior to most performances. Car: Commercial parking lots are located adjacent to BAM.

For ticket and BAMbus information, call BAM Ticket Services at 718.636.4100. When ordering your tickets, please use your Visa card. BAM Prefers Visa®.

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