North of Dallas, South of Houston

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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.