Woman at Table Meredith Monk

Annex 1 CREDIT LIST

Woman at table Meredith Monk Woman at table Louise Smith as Ann Hamilton Doctor Theo Bleckmann Woman at door Katie Geissinger Prisoner Ching Gonzalez Woman in black Ellen Fisher Musician John Hollenbeck Musician Allison Sniffin Musician Bohdan Hilash

Music Meredith Monk Lighting Design Noele Stollmack Costume Design Gabriel Berry Sound Design David Meschter Sound Engineer Lucas Indelicato Video Engineer & Mixer Mike Taylor Lighting Director Anthony Lyons Music Director Allison Sniffin Percussion Score John Hollenbeck Stage Manager Renee Miller Wardrobe Supervisor Anastasia Leopold Production Coordinator Jonathan Nye mercy is produced by The House Foundation for the Arts, Inc.

This piece has been commissioned by the American Dance Festival through the Doris Duke Awards for New Work; and the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University. Annex 2 PROFILE OF MEREDITH MONK

Meredith Monk Composer & Performer

Meredith Monk is a composer, singer, director/choreographer and creator of new opera, musical theatre works, films and installations. A pioneer in what is now called “extended vocal technique” and “interdisciplinary performance,” Monk creates works that thrive at the intersection of music and movement, image and object, light and sound in an effort to discover and weave together new modes of perception. Her ground breaking exploration of the voice as an instrument, as an eloquent language in and of itself, expands the boundaries of musical composition, creating landscapes of sound that unearth feelings, energies, and memories for which we have no words. She has alternately been proclaimed as a “voice of the future” and “one of America’s coolest composers.” During a career that spans more than 35 years she has been acclaimed by audiences and critics as a major creative force in the performing arts.

Since graduating from Sarah Lawrence College in 1964, Monk has received numerous awards throughout her career, including the prestigious MacArthur “Genius” Award in 1995, two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Brandeis Creative Arts Award, three “Obies” (including an award for Sustained Achievement), two Villager Awards, a “Bessie” for Sustained Creative Achievement, the 1986 National Music Theatre Award, sixteen American Society of Composers, Authors and Publisher (ASCAP) Awards for Musical Composition and the 1992 Dance Magazine Award. She holds honorary Doctor of Arts degrees from Bard College, the University of the Arts, The Julliard School, the San Francisco Art Institute and the Boston Conservatory. Her recordings Dolmen Music (ECM New Series) and Our Lady of Late: The Vanguard Tapes (Wergo) were honoured with the German Critics Prize for Best Records of 1981 and 1986. Her music has been heard in numerous films, including La Nouvelle Vague by Jean-Luc Godard and The Big Lebowski by Joel and Ethan Coen. A new publishing relationship with Boosey & Hawkes makes Meredith Monk's music available to a wider public for the first time.

In 1968, Monk founded The House, a company dedicated to an interdisciplinary approach to performance. In 1978 she formed Meredith Monk and Vocal Ensemble to expand her musical textures and forms. She has made more than a dozen recordings, most of which are on the ECM New Series label. Her music has been performed by numerous soloists and groups including The Chorus of the San Francisco Symphony, Musica Sacra, The Pacific Mozart Ensemble, Double Edge, and Bang On A Can All- Stars, among others.

Monk is a pioneer in site-specific performance, creating works such as Juice: A Theater Cantata In 3 Instalments (1969) and most recently American Archeology #1: Roosevelt Island (1994). She is also an accomplished filmmaker who has made a series of award- winning films including Ellis Island (1981) and her first feature, Book Of Days (1988), which was aired on PBS, shown at the New York Film Festival and selected for the Whitney Museum’s Biennial. A retrospective art exhibition, Meredith Monk: Archeology of an Artist, opened at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center in 1996. Other recent art exhibits comprise of a major installation, Art Performs Life at The Walker Art Center, a show Shrines at the Frederieke Taylor / TZ’ Art Gallery, inclusion in the 2002 Biennial at the Whitney Museum, ev +a 2002 Exhibition at Limerick City Gallery of Art and a group exhibit Show People at Exit Art. A monograph, Meredith Monk, edited by Deborah Jowitt was released by Johns Hopkins Press in 1997.

In October 1999 Monk performed a Vocal Offering for His Holiness, the Dalai Lama as part of the World Festival of Sacred Music in Los Angeles. In July 2000 her music was honoured by a three concert retrospective entitled Voice Travel as part of the Lincoln Center Festival. Her first orchestra piece Possible Sky commissioned by Michael Tilson Thomas for the New World Symphony, premiered in April of this year in Miami. Annex 3 PROFILE OF ANN HAMILTON

Ann Hamilton Visual Artist

Ann Hamilton is a visual artist whose multi-media installations have won her wide attention and critical acclaim. She is known for creating temporal environments that are rich in accumulated materials and innumerable traces of the hand’s mark.

She represented the United States in the 1991 Sao Paulo Biennial and the 1999 Venice Biennial, and has exhibited extensively in North America, Europe, Japan and Australia. Her major museum installations include The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1988); The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (1991); Dia Center for the Arts, New York (1993); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1994); The Tate Gallery, Liverpool (1994); The Art Institute of Chicago (1995); The Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands (1996); The Musee d'art Contemporain, Lyon, France (1997); Akira Ikeda Gallery, Taura, Japan (2001); and The Wanas Foundation, Knislinge, Sweden (2002). This year, Harry N. Abrams Inc. published a comprehensive monograph on Hamilton by Joan Simon.

Ann Hamilton was born in Lima, Ohio, in 1956. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in textile design from The University of Kansas, Lawrence, and a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture from the Yale School of Art in 1985. In 1993, Hamilton was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship as well as an NEA Visual Arts Fellowship. She was also the recipient of the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture, the College Art Association's Artists Award (both 1992), and had earlier received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, and a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. Her public sculpture projects include commissions for The San Francisco Public Library (with Ann Chamberlain), The Allegheny Riverfront Park, Pittsburgh and Teardrop Park, Battery Park City, New York (both with Michael Van Valkenburgh and Michael Mercil). At present, she is working on two recently announced commissions: a new Molecular and Cellular Biology Building at The University of Minnesota and the Seattle Central Library, designed by Rem Koolhas. She is also a professor at The Ohio State University.

A performing presence has been part of Ann Hamilton's sculpture practice since her first installation tableau, suitably positioned, 1984, in which she offered herself in a stilled posture, wearing a bristling suit made of painted toothpicks that became her animate skin. She won a Bessie Award, an annual New York theatrical award for Off- Broadway productions, in the creator category for her installation the earth never gets flat, 1987, in which she, ticking metronome in hand, and wearing a suit encrusted in grass seed, sat in a chair mounted high on a paprika-inflected wall.

Hamilton has collaborated with dancers, musicians and other performers since 1986, beginning with caught in the middle, working with Susan Hadley, Bradley Sowash, and Bob de Slob. Her 1998 collaboration with Meg Stuart and Stuart's company Damaged Goods, appetite, toured Europe and the U.S.A. during the 1998-1999 season. Her present collaboration with Meredith Monk explores her long-term interest in voice and uttered sound, in particular the structure of call-and-response, and of language and image coming into being. Her most recent works, using a mouth-held pinhole camera, address the very edge of inside and out, just as her room-size installations treat their planar linings as permeable membranes.