Vision, triumph on a grand scale

Attention spans are said to be shrinking and perhaps they are. But tell that to parents who cannot pull their kids away from video games. Tell that to epic-besotted Harry Potter, “Star Wars” and Tolkien fans. And tell it to the Lincoln Center Festival, which opened its 2005 edition last week.

The three-week festival offers a large variety of music, dance, theater and video, as well as a mix of all those media in various ways. But it has always been most notable for its willingness to think -- and spend -- big. This year, it has managed to finance three epic-scaled productions by three great masters of the performing arts, and it was possible to see all of them over a single weekend.

On Friday night I sat with an enthralled audience for Merce Cunningham’s grandest-scaled work, the 90-minute “Ocean.” Saturday night there was Robert Wilson’s luminous retelling of an obscure 6,000-page Indonesian epic, “I La Galigo,” which lasted three hours without intermission. Sunday afternoon and evening brought the marathon “Le Dernier Caravanserail (Odyssees)” (The Last Caravanserail [Odysseys]), a two-part epic recounting of the experiences of present-day Middle East and Eastern European emigres to Europe and Australia. The riveting production, held in a specially constructed tent in Damrosch Park, is an eight-hour affair (including dinner break) by the Theatre du Soleil, Ariane Mnouchkine’s celebrated Paris company.

These epics are radically different in content and style. Cunningham’s is all abstract movement and music, seemingly about nothing at all. Wilson turns his ultra-elegant, dazzling lighting on a culture and customs from a remote corner of the world. Mnouchkine looks unflinchingly at a central plight of modern times.

But they are not so different in intent. On the deepest, most essential level, all three ask the same important questions: What does it mean to survive? And where do we go from here?

The vision in these epics is dauntingly vast, and the theatrical accomplishment in each verges on the unbelievable. So let’s begin with something simple, like the walk.

Cunningham’s dancers don’t walk exactly. For “Ocean,” which had its premiere in Brussels in 1994 and was presented at the first Lincoln Center Festival two years later, Cunningham devised 128 movement phrases. Each is complex and includes, no doubt, combinations new to human muscles and joints. The phrases are, thus, strange but not unfamiliar. Since they are integral to the human body, and they propel the body in some way, we recognize them. But we can’t do them; only a Cunningham dancer can. And we can barely comprehend them, given the complexity of all the interactions between 14 dancers.

Throughout “Ocean,” which was presented in the round at the Rose Theater, part of the new facility for Jazz at Lincoln Center, the spectator is confronted with complexity. Overhead, surrounding the audience was an orchestra of 112 musicians playing a score by Andrew Culver made up of more than 30,000 musical events all merging together into an ever-changing oceanic drone. Additional electronic music by David Tudor proved ever mysterious and sounding as of the deep.

Yet throughout all the complexity is the very real sensation of triumph. We are submerged in possibilities. Nothing is predictable. The dancers keep arriving, keep doing something unexpected but with so strong a sense of purpose and beauty that one leaves the theater feeling one can find one’s way through the thicket. There is a place in this watery confusion for us all.

No walk is more distinctive than a mesmerizing Wilson walk, that slow-motion parade across the stage that freaks out theatrical speed freaks. “I La Galigo” begins with another such deliberate caravan. Characters in silhouette carrying jugs, jars, baskets move like snails, each displaying different footwork. A human worm joins the procession.

And “I La Galigo” ends with another purposeful walk, the characters carrying nothing, but this time their hands take up odd positions and some walk backward.

In between is a cultivated tale taken from “Sureq Galigo,” the impossibly long epic poem of South Sulawesi, Indonesia, written in a language that fewer than 100 can read today. The story is a creation myth in which gods in the Upper World and Lower World meddle with humans in the Middle World. It reminds us, in Joseph Campbell’s phrase, that the hero has a thousand faces, that we all tell versions of the same story whatever our culture. There are striking similarities, for instance, to Wagner’s “Ring” in the way the illicit love of a pair of twins brings about the downfall of the gods.

Wilson’s walkers frame the story. He uses more than 50 Sulawesian actors, dancers and musicians. He lights them magically. Sometimes he adds his own peculiar touches, such as goofy animals. There are all the stark angles, odd poses and extravagantly sudden and specific lighting cues that are hallmarks of any Wilson production.

But Wilson is also profoundly respectful of what he finds on this distant island of 5 million, including his use of a Bissu, a transvestite priest who remained patiently seated at the front of the New York State Theater stage throughout the performance.

One subtext of this show is that it is the mythological basis of a sect of Islam whose existence is threatened by fundamentalists. Wilson’s production does a remarkably good job in revealing a magical connectedness of people everywhere. For him, the writing is in the sky and the earth as well as the manuscript pages, and that cannot be taken away.

Mnouchkine’s actors don’t walk at all on the stage. To symbolize the rootlessness of exiles, she allows no character’s foot to touch ground, so all the players are wheeled on platforms. And between the 42 scenes that make up both parts of “Caravanserail,” she often has the pushers (actors not in the current scene) careening across stage with their carts.

Mnouchkine collected stories of emigres from Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Kurdistan, Chechnya, the Caucasus. The first half, in 19 scenes, is about the ordeal of fleeing. The second half, in 23 scenes, is about the ordeal of the fled. Dozens of actors each take many roles, and their stories are intertwined. Few have happy endings as repression at home, whether by fundamentalist Islamic sects or other dictatorial regimes, is replaced by repression in Europe and Australia. “Nothing good for humans remains,” as one still-trapped emigre finds out upon landing in Europe.

What sad stories and yet what exhilarating and inventive theater. How to reconcile the two? It is almost as if the resiliency of the human spirit animates this brilliant cast. The scenes of repression are terrible. “At the barricades,” one Afghan says of the Taliban, “love is being whipped.” And at the barricades, protesters in Iran are literally being whipped -- 70 lashes to a young woman who is caught.

Staying is impossible but so can be leaving, what with storms at sea, brutal smugglers and governments that turn a blind eye and deaf ear to suffering.

Mnouchkine’s Theatre du Soleil, which made its U.S. debut at the Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles 21 years ago but has been little seen in the country since, is astonishing in its use of the most basic qualities of theater to mingle cultures and traditions. Technology can be shockingly low. Actors wave silken fabric to represent the waves of the sea, yet I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more terrifying storm scene on stage.

This is not the vibrant ocean of “Ocean.” It is not the stunning watery apparitions of “I La Galigo.” But in all three oceans we feel the raw power of the planet and the struggles of the life to continue on it. Cunningham, Wilson and Mnouchkine don’t offer easy answers. They continually ask new questions. But in doing so, they demonstrate just how profound is the interconnectedness of life on this planet and how important an awareness of that is if we are to continue it. They make us more alert. And they put on really great shows.