North of Dallas, South of Houston

By Michael Walsh.

For all his startling imagery and elemental, manic drive, David Byrne is not alone. In fact, Byrne is only the most visible member of a movement that has recently vacated its artist-loft digs in lower Manhattan and joyfully taken up residence right next door to the American mainstream. Call it a celebration of specialness: SoHo has come uptown.

A collection of adventurous theater directors, dancers, composers and rock musicians that has been bubbling south of Houston Street since the 1960s has wedded high art to pop culture. Composer Philip Glass has brought the pulsating idiom of rock into the sacred precincts of the opera house, while Theater Artist Robert Wilson's slow-motion dreamscapes have influenced not only a neophyte filmmaker like Byrne but an experienced theater director like Andrei Serban. Performance art, an offbeat amalgam of music, theater, narration and stand-up comedy, has caught flight on the puckish wings of Laurie Anderson. Choreographers such as Twyla Tharp, Lucinda Childs and Laura Dean have pushed out the envelope of movement with each new step they have taken.

Sounds and images once considered experimental are now becoming commonplace. Knockoffs of Glass's trademark repeating chords and arpeggios pop up in television commercials, movie scores and the New Age sounds of Windham Hill. Tharp's sinuous, explosive movements have been danced by Mikhail Baryshnikov. Free-form surrealism is the mainstay of the rock videos on MTV, and their most innovative directors, like Russell Mulcahy, have graduated to feature films. Probably not in the past half-century have the works of the avant-garde achieved such wide currency among mainstream audiences.

But isn't it the function of the avant-garde to afflict the comfortable, to , stick a rude thumb into society's eye? Maybe not. Playwright Robert Coe, who has collaborated with both Glass and Anderson, has noted that the "avant- garde performing arts just don't play by the same rules as a decade ago . . . For the first time in the history of postwar experimental performance, serious artists have ceased to assume an attitude of indifference or superiority to the culture-at-large." Perhaps as a result, popular culture is no longer indifferent to them. Observes Byrne: "In the past, traditional artists didn't care what the public thought. More recently people want to show their stuff to a wider audience and be accepted. People like Anderson and Glass don't consider it selling out to approach a popular audience."

In fact, the very rules of the game have changed, thanks to technology. The postwar transistor and video generations have grown up accepting the electronic media as legitimate sources of art. The late Pianist Glenn Gould was considered odd when he abandoned the concert hall for the recording studio, but to the rock generation there is little or no difference between stereo loudspeakers and a live performance. The first group of performing artists who have fully integrated technology into their acts have encountered listeners eager to celebrate their message.

In her 1982 ballet Bad Smells, Tharp used a snoopily aggressive closed- circuit video camera to chart her dancers' every move, projecting close-up images on an overhead TV screen. Anderson's works, such as her two-evening epic United States, Parts I-IV (1983) or her 1985 stage show Home of the Brave, play off the television culture that gave them birth. Indeed, some avantgardists have made the television screen their preferred medium, like Korean-born Video Artist Nam June Paik, who amasses hundreds of video monitors in assemblages. When Byrne, driving along the Texas highways in his red 1985 Chrysler Le Baron convertible in True Stories, turns to the camera and exclaims, "Radio reception is great here!" his excitement is real. Anyone born after 1950 understands the synergy between rock 'n' roll, a radio and the open road.

Not everyone is enthusiastic. "It is meaningless to describe anything as avant-garde today," says Hilton Kramer, editor of the New Criterion. "Once you had a success on the order of pop art in the early '60s, it was no longer possible to define anything as avant-garde because there was no longer anything that met with resistance. Once what was formerly regarded as avant- garde was embraced by the mainstream, you simply had novelty." While Kramer admits Wilson's work has an audience, he is nevertheless dismissive. "I think it's a terrible bore. But people of mainstream culture now can accommodate boredom."

Still, for many the distinction between highbrow and low rent are increasingly arbitrary. "What we are beginning to see now is that people on both sides are taking with equal seriousness someone like a David Byrne," notes David White, executive director of Dance Theater Workshop, a favorite showcase for avant-garde choreographers in downtown Manhattan. Nor are there firm boundaries delimiting art forms anymore. Wilson, Glass and the others collaborate often, particularly in the realm of musical theater (and, by extension, film), which has become the avant-garde art form of choice. "There has been a general move toward a real theatricality," says White. "You create something that is full of images and evocations and poetry, and it appeals to people in a lot of ways on a lot of levels."

Collaboration among prominent avant-gardists, of course, is nothing new. In 1910 Serge Diaghilev, the flamboyant Russian impresario and leader of the Ballets Russes, brought together Composer Igor Stravinsky and Choreographer Michel Fokine to create The Firebird; and Composer John Cage and Modern Choreographer Merce Cunningham have worked together frequently. Nor is it unheard-of for a rock musician to hang out with the classical avant-garde: Frank Zappa, formerly of the Mothers of Invention, has had his serious chamber works conducted by no less than Pierre Boulez. What distinguishes the SoHo artists is the familiar ease with which their works play off one another.

Toward the end of True Stories there is a down-home talent show, replete with dueling auctioneers and a chorus line of just plain folks wrapped in Old Glory. What makes the scene -- pure performance art -- so arresting, though, is not its content but its location. In the X-ray light of the setting sun, each catwalk and scaffold of a makeshift stage stands silhouetted against the empty spaces of the plains. At this instant, the vision of another artist leaps to mind: the spaceship sequence from Einstein on the Beach.

Besides paying homage to Wilson, True Stories also tips its dude-ranch ten- gallon Stetson to, among others, Glass and Meredith Monk, who choreographed the film's opening and closing tableaux. Byrne and Wilson will collaborate on The Forest, conceived as both a live opera and a film and scheduled for a Berlin premiere in 1988. Glass and Wilson joined forces on Einstein, the work that marked the avant-garde's uptown coming-out party at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1976, and earlier this year Glass released the album Songs from Liquid Days, which featured lyrics by Byrne, Anderson, Paul Simon and Suzanne Vega, with performances by Linda Ronstadt and the Kronos String Quartet.

In 1989 Wilson and Glass will join forces again with a new opera based on the tales of the Arabian nights. Their last collaboration was the Rome section of Wilson's global epic, the CIVIL warS, which will be performed in December as the closing attraction of the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival, now in its fourth season. The academy, affectionately known as BAM, has become a national showcase for avant-garde work; its president, Harvey Lichtenstein, is the movement's Sol Hurok. When Lichtenstein courageously produced Wilson's The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud in 1969, few thought Wilson's glacially paced musings would be the stuff of box-office success. But when Glass's opera about the early life of Gandhi, Satyagraha, unexpectedly sold out in the fall of 1981, it was time to think again.

The avant-garde became hot, even chic. Bianca Jagger and Diane Keaton joined the Next Wave Producers Council, young urban professionals who had never gone near Lincoln Center flocked across the Brooklyn Bridge, and a BAM ticket became the scarcest in town. The first Next Wave Festival in 1983 featured Director Lee Breuer and Composer Bob Telson's dazzling wedding of Sophocles and soul, The Gospel at Colonus, which was later televised on PBS. The next year saw a triumphant reprise of Einstein, while last season brought Wilson's incandescent play The Golden Windows. It also brought forth a full-fledged disaster in The Birth of the Poet, a misbegotten collaboration among Punk Novelist Kathy Acker, Composer Peter Gordon, Set and Costume Designer David Salle and Director Richard Foreman that was aptly greeted with a chorus of catcalls.

Glass, Wilson, Byrne, Anderson and others had their consciousnesses forged in the '60s, when formal artistic boundaries were as inviting a target as the windows in a college dean's office. Their minimalist spirit was a reaction to the arid formalism that dominated the postwar period, particularly in music. But the rebellion is over, the insurgents have won, and they now find themselves in the unexpected -- and sometimes uneasy -- position of having become the Establishment. Notes the Next Wave's Roger W. Oliver: "All these artists started in opposition to what was being done at the time. But as they have matured, and in order to grow as artists, they had to move toward the center." To combat middle-age spread, they have branched out. Wilson has taken up traditional opera (he will direct Strauss's Salome at La Scala in January), Glass has written movie scores (Koyaanisquatsi, Mishima), while Tharp has choreographed for the American Ballet Theater and worked with Jerome Robbins. The have-nots have become the haves.

So when does the next revolution start? "There will always be an edge of work that has not been discovered, people working on the fringe," says Mark Russell, director of Performance Space 122, a funky theater carved out of an abandoned public school in Manhattan's East Village. "There is a whole wave of people working this way now, underneath the surface." The avant-garde must always remain one step ahead, testing and trying public sensibilities. But what Byrne, Wilson and the others have done is reassert that direct, simple communication can be a revolutionary concept too. And that is a true story.

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/New York