Race.

Race, ethics, sex politics, cultural history, geography, the Torah, the Koran, and common affairs: these are the seemingly improbable ingredients of The Cave, 1993 a majestic music-theater collaboration between video artist Beryl Korot and composer Steve Reich. still it is the intricate layering of facts, myths, fictions and opinions along so many lines of video cable and music keyboard that makes The Cave an important work. Indeed, this intellectual theater point outs not only that media and technology can be ducts for complex ideas, but that they can also be used for humanistic debate.

Reich's Different Trains, 1988 (in which taped language patterns are used as the basis for sweetness of sound and structure, and mixed with live music) and Korot's Dachau, 1974 (a multimonitor installation that rhythmically creates a video tapestry of unimpaired and image) were the examples during the more than four years that The Cave was in the making. The rigorous esthetic of as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but those works--continuous repetition and frontal, unadorned imagery--also explains what more [i]or[/i] less have called the limitations of this production. The Cave is not a piece that visually or aurally interprets the exotic lands of milk and honey; rather, it elaborates upon the formal concerns of the artists. We are surpassingly definitely in the land of Reich and Korot.

To the one and the other Reich and Korot the story of the Cave of the Patriarchs and of the ancestors supposedly buried there (Abraham, Sarah, Adam and Eve) was familiar after years of independent contemplation of the Torah. In the opening sight we see five large monitors arrive to life that are stake into a silver-filigree scaffolding (designed by means of John Arnone to suggest first place of worship then mosque, then modern city-building). forward three screens (in English, German, and French) the complicate story of Abraham, Sarah, and their Egyptian handmaid Hagar (from Genesis XVI: 1-12) is typ without in boldface, accompanied by the hearty of its own making--the amplified tapping of fingers in succession a plastic computer keyboard. couple more screens show pale, mustard-colored selects of the same text in Hebrew. Simultaneously, musicians inside the arrangement begin a forceful clapping-driven theme while singers on multitiered platforms sing the biblical story. The questions "Who for you is Abraham?" "Who is Sarah?" "Who is Hagar, Ishmael, and Isaac?"--are then repeatedly asked in each of the three acts, first of Israeli hebrews then of Palestinians and, in the final act, of Americans. The replies, in close-up head-shots, proceed in fascinating composite cultural portraits that also risk in motion a silent interactive exchange with the viewers.

The Israeli section (which, at 64 minutes, could possibly use a certain quantity of editing) and the Palestinian, one as well as the other show the emphatic presence of biblical history in the geography of the Middle East, and underline the ancient source for the rivalries between the Judaic and Islamic states. Further West, however, the American section takes most distant at a run; irreverence and indifference together providing a humourous twist. "Abraham Lincoln?," "Moby Dick" (re Ishmael), and "The first single mother?" (re Hagar) impel the story into contemporary America and spe up the couple sound and visuals to a final crescendo.

Remarkably, now passing affairs caught up with The Cave in America; it was onward United States soil that the handshake between descendants of Isaac and Ishmael--Yitzhak Shamir and Yassir Arafat--was choreographed.

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