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Earlier Serban opera productions, notably a misbegotten Turandot for London's Royal Opera House, have been willful. But in The Juniper Tree he has had the good sense to emulate the haunting imagery and striking tableaux that are Wilson's hallmarks. The tree, whose branches agonizingly split apart as the father dines lustily on his unholy supper, is pure Wilson; so is the unexpected apparition of the first wife, aboard what appears to be a rhinoceros, as the guilty stepmother's conscience afflicts her.
The absorption of Wilson and Glass into the cultural mainstream is not surprising. In the evolution of art, the substantial contributions of the avant-garde become part of the culture. In addition to The Juniper Tree, the current ART season also features Wilson's adaptation of Euripides' Alcestis, with music by Performance Artist Laurie Anderson. And the recently concluded Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music had as a highlight Wilson's theater piece The Golden Windows, an elusive love story with a Beckett-like nonsense text and some startling stage pictures, including an earthquake that sunders the stage and a dazzling meteor shower. Just as the West German city of Darmstadt nurtured the post-Webern twelve-tone composers after World War II, so has the Brooklyn Academy offered a safe haven for the minimalists from SoHo.
Too safe, perhaps? The edge of contemporary music-dance theater is now to be found in West Germany, where Choreographer Pina Bausch and a coterie of disciples are taking the 60-year-old tradition of German Ausdruckstanz (dance of expression) and transforming it into the even rawer and more visceral Tanztheater. Their work, several vivid examples of which were seen in Brooklyn this fall, is a cultural outcry that rends the emotions: the tumult of a displaced culture engaged in profound self-examination.
By contrast, the American avant-garde appears largely to have conquered the angst that it felt during the '60s. It has lost much of its rebelliousness, but in so doing has discovered a more delicate mode of expression as well as a broader popular base. To refine and succeed is not necessarily to become complacent or sell out. The crucial thing for any style is to avoid both self- satisfaction and self-parody, to keep the visions fresh. If The Juniper Tree is any indication, the American avant-garde is alive and well, just a little older and wiser.