OPERA : The Wordless Libretto : There’s an absence of text in avant-garde composer Meredith Monk’s ‘ATLAS,’ but no absence of adventure

Marcel Marceau has a troupe that performs wordless plays he calls mimodramas. After she retired in the ‘40s, soprano Miliza Korjus threatened to make a comeback in an opera about Nefertiti in which the cast would do nothing but hum. So there’s nothing truly unique about the absence of text in “ATLAS,” avant-garde composer Meredith Monk’s new, 3 1/4-hour opera in which the only words are a few lines of spoken dialogue.

Monk’s first work for an opera company, “ATLAS: an opera in three parts,” was given its world premiere Feb. 22 in the 1,100-seat Cullen Theater of Wortham Theater Center. It was produced as part of Opera New World, a new Houston Grand Opera program whose goal is to redefine traditional opera repertory. Inspired by the life of explorer Alexandra Daniels, the work chronicles a quest by Daniels and several soul mates for adventure, meaning and spiritual transcendence. Aided by guardian angel-like guides and tormented by ghosts and demons, the travelers journey to the tropics, the Arctic, a desert, a forest, a city apparently under dictatorial martial law and, finally, a heavenly “realm of pure energy.”

Monk was invited to write the ambitious work by HGO general director David Gockley. In 1985, he asked Monk to mount her “Dolmen Music” on the singers of the Houston Opera Studio, HGO’s training wing. He wanted to see if classically trained singers could perform her highly original, evocative and expressive music, which is often pigeonholed as minimalist and involves expanded vocal techniques she has been developing for the last 25 years. Supported by mostly lulling, simply triadic, repetitive instrumental accompaniment, these multicultural effects include glottal growls, keening ululations, stuttered monosyllables, yodely register shifts, vibrato manipulation and animal sounds.

Gockley felt the experiment succeeded and pointed to a whole new kind of opera. So he commissioned Monk to create a full-length piece of music theater, using members of her New York-based company, the House Foundation for the Arts, and practicing opera singers of the sort found in opera workshops or inflated Broadway musicals such as “The Phantom of the Opera.” (Singers with robust, fully resonant voices and the physiques and techniques needed to produce them wouldn’t jibe with Monk’s miked, dance-like productions and the low-decibel, “held” vocal production she espouses.)

The idea of a three-act music drama with virtually no text might startle many opera lovers but didn’t faze Gockley at all. “Most people don’t understand Italian, French or German,” he said, so attending performances prior to the recent introduction of supertitles “has been a nonverbal experience for most of their opera-going lives.”

Monk has been calling her larger theater works “operas” since 1971. But they have little in common with the “museum pieces” that are the backbone of opera seasons around the world. To her, an opera is not a play set to music but “a multi-perceptual form combining music, movement, theater and visual images. I’m a fan of the idea of opera but not the way it has been done,” she said a couple of days after the premiere.

Monk’s way of doing is decidedly different. The rehearsal period for “ATLAS” consisted of three, monthlong periods of sometimes improvisational work separated by hiatuses for codifying the score. She created the work the way a choreographer makes a ballet on dancers, tailoring the roles to cast members’ abilities and personalities. A dancer and choreographer before she became a composer, Monk believes a singer’s instrument is not just his or her voice. So, to make the opera singers more physically liberated and expressive, she put them through a daily 90-minute pre-rehearsal body warm-up that included walking exercises and lessons in t’ai chi, the combination martial art and stylized, meditative exercise.

With composer/director/choreographer Monk given creative carte blanche within a $500,000 budget, the finished product is an uneven but ultimately charming and emotionally resonant work full of soothingly purling vocalism, hypnotically stylized staging, disarming humor and restorative philosophy. The production boasts a well-drilled ensemble cast of 18, an aurally transparent orchestra of 10 led by Wayne Hankin and spare but attractive scenery by Debbie Lee Cohen and Yoshio Yabara. The work was commissioned by Houston Grand Opera, the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis (where it will be performed Monday and Tuesday) and the American Music Theater in Philadelphia (where it will run June 6-9). The latest of HGO’s 11 world premieres, the work will also tour to Cleveland’s Wexner Center for the Arts (March 9), Berlin’s Hebbel Theater (July 12-16) and the Festival d’Avignon in France (July 19-22).

Part I, titled “Personal Climate,” opens in the 1950s home of the girlhood Alexandra (Dina Emerson)--as full of yearning as the girl in “The Member of the Wedding”--and her parents (Wendy Hill and Thomas Bogdan). The act ends with the adult Alexandra, played by Monk herself, accepting Chen Qing (played by Chen Shizheng), Franco Hartmann (Stephen Kalm) and Erik Magnusson (Robert Een) as fellow travelers.

With occasional flashbacks to Mom and Dad sitting at home, their sojourns are detailed in Part II, called “Night Travel.” The party visits a tropical isle where haystacks turn out to be crouching natives in straw capes who get up and do a kind of fertility dance. In a comical visit to an Arctic bar, the travelers take on a fifth member (played by Dana Hanchard). They also experience danger and mystery in the form of a towering Hungry Ghost (Janis Brenner perched on Wilbur Pauley’s shoulders), a Lonely Spirit (male soprano Randall Wong) and four cackling, claw-handed Ice Demons.

The last destinations are a forest, where an Ancient Man (Wilbur Pauley) with a beard a couple of yards long mutters some basso profundities, a desert where two characters break into a tango while camels galumph across the stage behind them, and a “1984”-style dictatorship run by a crazed technocrat (Robert Een in a startlingly frenzied solo).

Escaping by climbing a ladder let down by the guardian-angel guides (Ching Gonzalez and Allison Easter), the protagonists emerge in Part III, dubbed “Invisible Light.” Here they join a robed celestial choir whose slow perambulations and hypnotic chanting suggest planetary movement and the music of the spheres. “ATLAS” ends with Alexandra returning to Earth and, as a 60-year-old woman (played by Sally Gross), sitting at her kitchen table and gazing fondly at her younger selves.

A prolific composer, Monk is the author of more than 60 interdisciplinary music-theater works since she made her New York debut 27 years ago. The last piece she performed in Los Angeles was “The Games” in 1986. She hasn’t been occupied only with “ATLAS” since then. The same year, she wrote “Acts From Under and Above.” It deals with intimacy among people who have known each other a long time, and Monk’s “Scared Song” solo is included on her 1987 album on the ECM label, “Do You Be.”

Monk also wrote “Facing North,” a duet developed with long-time collaborator Robert Een, introduced last spring and due for its New York premiere in April. But between “The Games” and “ATLAS,” most of her time and creative energy was devoted to “Book of Days,” a film she began working on in the summer of 1984 and didn’t finish until 1988.

“Half of the gestation period was taken up by raising money,” Monk griped. Although it generates typically quirky Monkian humor by putting the characters through man-in-the-street interviews that ask such questions as “What kind of work do you do?” and “Do you like cabbage?,” “Book of Days” explores the life of Jews in a medieval European ghetto. “But,” the elfin Monk said with a smile, “there was no sex.”

Some funds were forthcoming from PBS, which broadcast the film in its “Alive From Off Center” series, and France’s Channel 7. Although her House Foundation for the Arts “is still bankrupt” because of the high cost of making 35-millimeter prints, “Book of Days” was shown at the New York, Montreal, Berlin, Hong Kong and Florence film festivals and then theatrically released. And the “Book of Days” album, Monk beamed, “is one of my favorites.” She rewrote some music from the film and even added some that’s not in it, to make the record less a soundtrack album than a separate “movie for the ears.”

But then, all of Monk’s beguiling works are movies for the ears.