Meredith Monk

Meredith Monk Four Decades by Design and by Invention Nancy Putnam Smithner Introduction Meredith Monk is a dancer/choreographer, an actress/stage director, a story- teller/filmmaker, and a singer/composer. Monk’s eclectic career spans four decades of what she calls a “meshed interweaving” of music, gesture, choreography, text, objects, film, and spatial relationships. In addition to creating over original musical and theatrical works, Monk has made over sound recordings and in- dependent films. Monk’s works flow between structure and improvisation, humor and poi- gnancy. Always there is the interplay of rhythm, musicality, and space:“You know how in kabuki, what you think is the figure becomes the ground? I love that. The constant shift of perceptions, the shifting of balance, the multidimensional experience—that’s what I want in my theatre” (in Shapiro :). Ironically Monk, who is often referred to as a postmodernist, intentionally creates works entailing a timeless or slowed-down tempo as a deliberate antidote to the frantic pace of postmodern fragmentation: I don’t feel particularly connected to a movement like postmodernism on a certain level because I’m really interested in things that have always ex- isted and that have a level of timelessness. I’m much more interested in the things that might have happened million years ago as well as now, as well as the future. () However, her work is not linear. Monk believes that linearity does not reflect to- day’s complex world where “fragments of behavior and imagery are constantly coming through our consciousness all at once” (). Over the years, Monk has directed ensembles of many different sizes and types. Her directing has evolved in relation to the challenges arising in such situations. Monk feels that while part of her work is personal, another large part is collabo- rative: “I integrate material furnished by the participants into my personal cre- ation. It is the interior life of the actor that interests me” (). I have seen many of Monk’s works in the past years and have interviewed her four times in the last three years. I have also spoken to members of her ensemble, both past and present. I have observed rehearsals, attended her lectures, and experienced works in progress. Throughout this journey, I observed an artist The Drama Review 49, 2 (T186), Summer 2005. © 2005 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1054204053971054 by guest on 24 September 2021 Nancy Putnam Smithner who needs and wants to work collaboratively, yet who through an extraordinary layering of imagination and physical skill strongly controls all the basic aspects of her work. An examination of Monk’s background, the evolution of her performing ensembles (The House and the Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble), and her complex directing process reveals both the power of community in her work and the growth of a performer and director who continually redefines herself. Background Meredith Jane Monk was born in in Lima, Peru, where her mother was giving a series of music con- certs. A professional singer in radio variety shows and commercials, her mother worked under the name of Audrey Marsh. She had “the chops of a classical singer but sang everything from Victor Herbert to commercials for Muriel Cigars” ( Jowitt ). Music making was a regular activity in the Monk household. Her family had a distinctly musical background—her maternal great grandfather had been a cantor in the Czar’s court, her grandmother was a pianist, and her paternal grandfather founded the Zellman Conservatory of Music in Harlem, New York. Monk focused on the arts at an early age. She began to study the piano at age three. She sang in choirs, and 1. Meredith Monk and her took classes in the Dalcroze Eurythmics Method, a sys- neighborhood friend, Nancy, tem of teaching music which emphasizes the integration of sound, sight, and at the piano in 1947. (Photo movement. Monk recalls: “It was like learning music through movement [...;] I courtesy of Meredith Monk) was like a little duck in water.” She lived on Manhattan’s Upper West Side until the age of eight when her family moved to Connecticut. There Monk took ballet, modern dance, and mime (Moritz :). She attended The George School, a Quaker, coeducational school in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. At The George School she acted in plays, choreographed several dance and musical comedy student productions, and realized that she did not want to be an actress: “I could not memorize a line! And that’s why I write music without words” (in Wallach :). Monk graduated in with a degree in interdisciplinary performing arts from Sarah Lawrence College. At college, Monk studied dance, voice, music, act- ing, writing, and literature. She particularly remembers an opera workshop in which she was offered the freedom to use emotion in her work: “I was encour- aged to work with a feeling, an idea [...] and let the medium and form find itself. It seemed that finally I was able to combine movement with music and words, all coming from a single source [...,] a total experience” (in Moritz :). She recalls the influence of music teacher Ruth Lloyd and the “genius teacher” Bessie Schoenberg. Schoenberg would later act as Monk’s third eye and counsel. At Sarah Lawrence, Monk continued to sing, incorporating Israeli folk music and medieval French music into original works, which she named And Sarah Knew () and Troubadour Songs (). She earned her way through college partially by singing and playing her guitar at children’s birthday parties and in a rock group called the Inner Ear. It was then that Monk began experimenting with her voice as an instrument, experimenting with her three-octave range. In her last year at Sarah Lawrence, Monk studied with Merce Cunningham Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1054204053971054 by guest on 24 September 2021 Meredith Monk 2. Meredith Monk in The Beach (1965), a solo performance at Hardware Poets Playhouse, New York City.(Photo by Terry Schutte; courtesy of The House Foundation for the Arts) and performed in his Suit by Chance (). In this piece, the dancers created their own parts. Monk realized that Cunningham’s compositional method was not for her:“I feel closer to [Martha] Graham than Cunningham because of the way she tries to make a composite form” (in Keonig :). During the summers of and , Monk went to New York City to study ballet at the Joffrey School and modern dance with Mary Anthony. In the summer of she attended the American Dance Festival at Connecticut College in New London. During this phase of her life, Monk was also influenced by Anna Halprin, whose pieces were considered as much theatre as dance. In , shortly after graduating from Sarah Lawrence, Monk moved to Man- hattan where avantgarde theatre and dance were thriving in alternative spaces and on the street. Monk recalls:“Sculptors were making dances, musicians were paint- ing, poets were composing music. There was a vibrant atmosphere of experi- mentation, of breaking down boundaries” (). Earlier, in , she had seen the work of the Judson Dance Theatre and the Judson Poet’s Theatre. Even after the Judson groups disbanded in , before Monk moved to New York, the Jud- son Church was open as a performance site. A Judson artistic community of dancers, playwrights, musicians, poets, and visual artists was still thriving. Monk told me: “They had a kind of anarchistic ‘anything is possible’ attitude that was very affirmative for me because of the way I was working at Sarah Lawrence in my pieces. That was what my spirit was doing at the time” (). Although of a younger generation, Monk was drawn to the Judson artists because of the op- portunity to work with ordinary movement, chance, and sound in collaborations with visual artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Dick Higgins. But rather than adopting the pared-down movement and anti-spectacle approach of the Jud- son dancers, Monk developed her own theatrical style. For Monk, was a very busy year. She made new works, performed in Hap- penings, Off-Off-Broadway plays, and dance works of others. Her solo piece from that year, Break, with its soundtrack of car crashes, used images in a very cinematic way: “As a performer I had to make these instant persona transforma- tions from one person to another the way you would cut a film.” Monk recalls: Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1054204053971054 by guest on 24 September 2021 Nancy Putnam Smithner “I was dealing with a kind of fear, not hysteria, in an incredibly dead pan fash- ion” (). In Break Monk experimented with contrasting expressive gestures, exclamations, slow sustained motion, and quick transitions—performance de- vices that were to become hallmarks of her work. In addition to her own work, Monk improvised with Al Hansen on his Silver City for Andy Warhol () and worked with Dick Higgins—a former student of John Cage and member of Fluxus—who exercised firmer directorial control, dictating the score and the structure but then, according to Monk: “He left the performers to fulfill these conditions on their own [...;] at different times there was complete chaos, you did the best you could!” (in Keonig :). Her next original work was Cartoon (), a humorous solo that used deliberate exaggeration of gestures. Monk claims that this piece “was a move away from ‘dancey’ dances, or technical dance forms. I preferred to use the body as an expressive medium, working transformationally, not psychologically” (). Monk learned a great deal about theatre from Kenneth King, whom she de- scribes as a “seminal thinker”: “He came from a philosophy background at An- tioch College, and had a wide view of culture and how it applied to the political climate of the time, and he was an incredibly active philosopher of theatre and movement” ().

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