The Art of Meredith Monk Author(S): Sally Banes Reviewed Work(S): Source: Performing Arts Journal, Vol
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The Art of Meredith Monk Author(s): Sally Banes Reviewed work(s): Source: Performing Arts Journal, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Spring - Summer, 1978), pp. 3-18 Published by: Performing Arts Journal, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3244987 . Accessed: 06/02/2012 11:37 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Performing Arts Journal, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Performing Arts Journal. http://www.jstor.org The Art of Meredith Monk Sally Banes A fanciful program note from 1969 states: MEREDITH MONK was born in lima Peru/grew up in the West riding horses/is Inca Jewish/lived in a red house A COMMERCIAL: SHE WILL PRESENT A NEW WORK: "TOUR: DEDICATED TO DINOSAURS" ON MARCH 4 IN THE ROTUNDA OF THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION IN WASHINGTON, D.C. Started dancing lessons at the age of three because she could not skip/did Hippy Love Dance at Varney's Roaring 20's Topless Club in California/has brown hair.' As an autobiographical statement, it is the real Monk, even though some of its details may not be accurate-if one goes by rational, external verities. But in its stream-of-consciousness mixture of the most mundane details with unabashedly romantic figments, it's revealing of the texture of her work and life. Monk was born in Peru, where her mother, a singer, was on tour. But she grew up in Connecticut, the descendant of European Jews-including a cantor, her grandfather, who founded the Harlem School of Music. Monk 3 learned to sing before she could talk, read music before she knew how to read words. At three she began to dance, first studying eurhythmics (a system of teaching musical rhythm through body movement, invented by Emile Jaques Dalcroze) and then ballet. As a child she also studied music theory and harmony; at 16, she began composing. Monk'sfirst dance performances were with a New York group doing Israeli folk dances.2 In college at Sarah Lawrence, Monk majored in performing arts, studying with Judith Dunn and Bessie Schonberg among others. In 1964 she moved to Manhattan where, besides choreographing and dancing her own works, she performed in Happenings, off-Broadway plays, and other dance works. Monk's own work since 1964 can be divided roughly into five categories so far: early dance works; large works for specific sites; chamber works; collab- orations; music recitals. She has also made several films and recordings. By the time Monk arrived in New YorkCity, the dance world had seen the first stage of a creative rebellion and the choreographic revolutionaries of the first Judson generation were consolidating their discoveries and advances. Monk's work, in a sense, reacted against the aesthetic of that revolution, while taking advantage of an ambiance that fostered formal experiments. Her program did not involve rinsing dance of spectacle and theatricality-as had, for instance, Yvonne Rainer's-but rather, exploring the very theatri- cality of expressive performance. Break (1964) used the wings and back entrances of the theatre to mask parts of the soloist's body; at one point, Monk left the stage to view from the audience the vacuum thus created. Movements in The Beach (1965) were tailored for an imaginary persona- the beach lady. Like the Judson pioneers, though, Monk was less concerned with the attention to technical virtuosity that was strangling modern dance, and more concerned with generating new movements, if need be, to make new statements. Using strategems like chance composition, improvisation, games and tasks enacted during the performance, and repetition and fragmentation, Rainer and others sought to isolate movements for their own sake, to be examined and valued as objects in themselves. Rigorously defying illusion, these choreographers often presented openly the process of arrangement. The aim was to call attention to the beauty of ordinary, simple movements and (somewhat) ordinary bodies. Monk, on the other hand, wrenched quotidian movements and objects from the context of the everyday world, transmuting rather than presenting ordinary things by presenting them in new frameworks, forming within the theatre a separate world with its own logic and customs. Though she also used repetition and fragmentation, her mean- ings emerged-more in the tradition of some Happenings and even Graham'sexpressive dances-not through chance, rarely through improvisa- tion, but through the careful, poetic arrangement of visual and aural ima- gery, juxtapositions of surfaces, sounds, gestures and spaces. "The artist's hand isn't something I want to eliminate because that's like giving in to the machine," Monk has stated. And "John Cage would say there's enough structure and I would say there's enough chance."3 In Break a typical Monk structure is already evident. Jill Johnston de- scribed the piece as "a clear solid solo of expressive gestures and exclama- tions in the chunky continuity explained by the title. Moves are sudden, images are sustained (slow or still) for a sharp etch and erased by the quick 4 transitions that are like black-outs-empty canvas with spattered incidents. "4 16 Millimeter Earrings, a solo made in 1966, presented overlapping images of the body as a medical phenomenon and a sensuous medium, through the use of a complex technology. Layers of sound both live and taped included Monk singing Greensleeves, chanting, sounds of a crowd, and a taped description of the orgasm from Wilhelm Reich. The visual track included the dancer's live actions and several films. One film, of Monk's face, was projected on a large sphere placed over her head; another showed a doll burning, as Monk emerged from a trunk naked, amid red silk streamers blowing upward like fake flames, in front of the projection screen. The systematic distortion of the body and its actions-expressing emotions, executing movements-again recalls the apparitions and modified forms of the Surrealists. With Blueprint (1967), Monk began to design her pieces for particular, architectural (non-theatrical) sites. At the first performance of Blueprint, in Woodstock, New York, the audience moved from place to place to view activities, and at one point sat outside a building to watch events in the windows. In New York City the audience returned a month after the first section was given, to see the second part which included Monk dancing The Dying Swan. In 1969 Monk moved her audience around the Guggenheim Museum and the island of Manhattanin Juice. The first section, for a chorus of dancers and many separate characters, had three parts: first the audience, on the ground floor of the Guggenheim, looked upwards to see events including the chorus singing and migrating back and forth from the railings, three women in period costume lined up vertically and slowly rotating, four red-dyed people trampling up the ramp in a clump. Second, the audience journeyed up the spiral ramp, viewing many separate tableaux of poses, movements, and the current exhibit of Roy Lichtenstein's paintings in the background. All eighty- five performers were wearing red boots. Finally, the audience, having achieved a position at the top, saw everyone rush down past them, dancing and playing jew's harps. A man sawed wood; another man played the violin; a woman with a mask on her belly stalked at an enormous height. In the second installment of Juice, three weeks later at the Minor Latham Playhouse at Barnard College, everything had diminished. At the entrance to the theatre, a child sat on a rockinghorse-a smaller echo of the woman who rode a horse down Fifth Avenue as the audience waited outside the Guggenheim for part one. Inside the theatre, the four red characters gave information about themselves in recitatives, and performed real-life ac- tivities-frying a porkchop, mixing chemicals; the red mountain woman (Monk) whirled and sang in a trance; a log cabin was gradually dismantled to reveal the violinist from part one, in a room replete with wallpaper, books, a quart of milk, and a print of a Lichtenstein painting. A rock opened to reveal objects; the woman with the death mask belly appeared, normal height. Many more elements from the first part were rearranged and shrunk in this presentation. In the third installment, a week following, at Monk's loft in lower Manhat- tan, the audience wandered through an exhibit of artifacts--costumes and objects-from the previous two sections, and saw a videotape of closeups of the four red characters as they quietly discussed their roles. As Deborah Jowitt has suggested, the scale of the piece diminished as the 5 information about the characters increased, yet any resulting sense of a growing intimacy was offset by distancing devices.5 At the museum, the performers were living sculptures the spectators could hear breathing; at the Minor Latham, the audience was separated by a proscenium arch from the performance; finally, at Monk's loft, though one could even smell the sweat on the costumes, the performers were made totally remote, once-removed by the video screen. The museum and loft had switched functions by the end of the piece. Vessel (1971) reversed the progression of size and scope Juice had accom- plished. A privatized passion play about Joan of Arc, it began with an "overture" at The House, Monk's loft: a slowly shifting tableau of people dressed in black.