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 expe- rience—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 en- semble, 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 com- plex directing process reveals both the power of com- munity 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 commer- cials for Muriel Cigars” ( Jowitt ). Music making was a regular activity in the Monk household. Her fam- ily 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 grand- father 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 bal- let, 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 stu- dent 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 re- calls 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
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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 sum- mer 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 delib- erate 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” (). She performed in King’s Spectacular (), and he, in turn, performed in her Cartoon and Duet with Cat’s Scream and Locomotive (). Unlike many of her Judson contemporaries, Monk’s early work was not created through improvisation and chance, but by meticulous arrangement. In 16 Millime- ter Earrings () she used theatre, film, dance, and music, juxtaposing theatrical 3. Meredith Monk in Duet illusion with nonillusion, film with physical reality, and live sound with recorded with Cat Scream and sound. Wearing a bright red wig, Monk put a white cage-like dome over her head Locomotive (1966) at the and then projected a film onto the dome. In Robert Whither’s film on the Gate Theater,New York performance, close-up images of Monk’s face clearly showing her left eye, which City.(Photo by Charlotte is turned in, alternate with another image of her face covered with two different Victoria; courtesy of The sized magnifying glasses, which bizarrely distort her eyes. Monk raises her hand House Foundation for and appears to wipe the filmed eyes of the larger than life projected head, creating the Arts) a surreal and layered illusion. Monk recalls, “I was thinking of the stage as a canvas, like a painter, I worked with a sense of the tactility of surfaces and layers in a literal, physical way” (in Jowitt :). Monk regards 16 Millimeter Earrings as a breakthrough. It was the first time she performed what she calls “pure theatre.” Monk further explored theatricality and pop culture in Blueprint (I) () and Overload/Blueprint (II) (), where she continued to work with film and electronic devices. In the late s she also became increasingly involved in experimental music. Here she was influ- enced by Philip Corner, Malcolm Goldstein, James Tenney, and Nam June Paik. It was at this time that Monk explored her unique vocal abilities, drawing on the sounds of the natural world, ancient forms of litur- gical chant, and the folk music of several cultures. She recalls her initial revelation in that the voice had the fluidity of a hand or a spine. She found that she could use the voice not only as sound, but as a kinetic instrument. This work would become known as Monk’s “extended vocal technique.” While she finds it ironic that her work has a label and has become a kind of school in vocal study, today, Monk does not hesitate to define “extended vocal technique”:
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1054204053971054 by guest on 24 September 2021 Meredith Monk It is a way to try to explain a vocal approach which pushes through the parameters of the way people think about the human voice, dealing with all possibilities in terms of gender, age, character, persona, tambour, texture, breath, landscape. ()
In and throughout the next decade, Monk con- tinued to make personal vocal discoveries even as she delved into the art of ensemble performance.
Ensemble:The House and the Vocal Ensemble In the late ’s, Monk held a series of workshops in her studio at Broadway. The participants included visual artists, poets, dancers, actors, and musicians. Monk recalls:
It was an interesting group of people that were friends of mine from that Fluxus generation [...;] they were a generation ahead of me [...] and there was something about their very direct task- like way of orientation—ways of fulfilling prob- lems that I would give that was very different from the way a performer 4. Meredith Monk in would do it. And it was very refreshing to have people like that, and then Millimeter Earrings Lanny [Harrison], and Ping Chong and Blondell Cummings, and people (1966). Solo performance at who came straight from performing disciplines, working on the same the Judson Memorial problems. () Church, New York City. (Photo by Charlotte Victoria; courtesy of The Each workshop included a long movement and vocal warm-up followed by im- House Foundation for provising characters, movements, and songs. Out of these developed small group the Arts) or solo performances. Harrison, who first took part in , recalls how Monk influenced the others with her power as a performer: “No one moves like she does—strange mixture of light, airy zaniness and tremendous weight. When she dances, characters flit in and out of the room; ghosts take up posts in corners” (). It was at this point in the late s that Monk began to create large ensemble pieces. She formed The House in , some of whose members, including Har- rison, Chong, and Cummings, had participated in the loft workshops. Described at the time as a “semi-communal performing arts troupe,”The House was “a com- munity of multi-disciplined and versatile performers [that] had immeasurable in- fluence on the directions and ideas of Monk’s works” (Martin :). Indeed, according to Harrison, many of the ideas and images that later were used in such major works as Vessel () were improvised during The House’s national tour of colleges and art centers. From its inception, The House consisted of a small, dedicated nucleus and a broader collection of others who came and went depending upon the piece. In , Harrison described her involvement:
Working with Meredith has been much more than taking an acting or dancing job every once in a while. It is being a continuous member of the amorphic House—and that means “the work” is always buzzing around in one’s everyday-ish existence. (Harrison )
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Major Awards and Honors
Music Publishers’ Association Award () The MacArthur Fellowship () Dance Magazine Award () New York Dance and Performance Award (Bessie) for Sustained Creative Achievement () National Music Theatre Award () Guggenheim Fellowships (, ) German Critics Award for Best Record (, ) Brandeis Creative Arts Award () Obies (, , ) Sixteen ASCAP Awards for Musical Composition Honorary Doctor of Arts degrees from Cornish School of the Arts, Boston Conservatory, San Francisco Art Institute, The Julliard School, Uni- versity of the Arts, and Bard College
Most of the early members of The House did not have as thorough a multidisci- plinary training as Monk. Harrison, trained in mime and dance, appreciated the creativity that Monk’s direction brought out in everyone: “Meredith was an in- credibly wonderful guiding light in that time. We adored her music, we used to dance for hours together. I think the work sessions were as exciting as the per- formances” (). Monk made an effort to fit movements to each performer’s body and individ- uality. According to Kathy Duncan:
Some are clearly not trained dancers, but that makes their movement even more personally revealing. A great beauty in this work is that from an as- sortment of rough stones, the performers are polished through movement into different lustrous gems. They seem to be ordinary people, yet at the same time they are larger than life. ()
For The House, Monk chose people of all shapes, sizes, genders, races, and eth- nicities. Paul Langland, who joined in , recalls:
I saw Meredith’s work and I was instantly entranced because I saw the performance art values, I saw the classical sort of music, and art structural values. And that the individual look of the performer was celebrated and their personalities were celebrated. It was during the early seventies where everything was so burst wide open and there was money for the arts. It was such an exciting time and there was such a willingness to pursue ex- perimentation that for a while I was forgiven my lack of technique. ()
In making each performance, members sewed their own costumes, made or found props, and helped build the sets. They became adept at devising speeches, dances, and characters. The program notes for Tour 8: Castle () stated:
The House is a group of artists, actors, dancers and a scientist who are committed to performance as a means of expression and as a means of personal and hopefully social evolution. We seek to unite their work and
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1054204053971054 by guest on 24 September 2021 Meredith Monk their lives without losing our individuality. Our work is full of remem- bered things and dreamed things and felt things that aren’t seen and things that are seen outside and things that are only seen inside. There are things about each other that we don’t know. (The House )
The size of Monk’s ensemble varied according to each project. The largest groups participated in the environmental theatre works Juice: A Theatre Cantata () and Vessel:An Opera Epic (). The core members of The House adapted comfort- ably to the changing size of the ensemble. Pablo Vela recalls:“I didn’t think any- thing about it. That’s what the piece was. That’s just the way it was.” According to Harrison, even though there was a big chorus in Quarry ():
It was wonderful because [...] Pablo Vela, Tone Blevins, Danny [Ira Sverd- lik], Monica Mosely, we would all work very closely as a very small com- pany, just working on our characters [...] so it would be very intimate for a while. Then we’d open it up to the big group. Then we’d close it down again and just have rehearsals where we’d just work together. ()
Monk was unquestionably the hub of the group, introducing the key ideas, di- recting, composing, choreographing, and making the final decisions. But not everything was sweetness and light. Amei Wallach, who went to the George School with Monk, refers to The House in the early days as “messily intimate [...] with Monk playing parental guru, and not always particularly well” (:). According to those who worked with her, in the early years she was a taskmaster. She could be manipulative, im- patient, demanding, and even ruthless. Vela recalls: “It was like a family in the best sense of the word, and the worst, and we all know what that’s like.” Vela, who joined The House in to be in Quarry and continues to work with Monk in multiple capacities as performer, dramaturge, assistant director, and company teacher, admits that like any group: “We’ve had some major confrontations over the years.”Vela and Monk are good friends, and worked together again in the re- making of Quarry in the spring of , which included most of the original cast. Juice used performers, and was staged in two locations: Manhattan’s Solo- mon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Minor Latham Playhouse at Columbia University. Vessel had performers and was performed in three sections: Part One in Monk’s loft on Great Jones Street, Part Two in the Performing Garage, and Part Three in a parking lot on West Broadway between Grand and Canal Streets. Of Vessel Marcia B. Siegel wrote: “All these locations are in the bowels of New York City—the decaying industrial core that is worse than any slum, because it has been abandoned by everybody but the scavengers” (:). These large works established Monk as a pioneer of site-specific performance. For Monk, space was and remains an important part of her equation. In her early work, each piece was suited to a specific performance space chosen early on in the creative process. Monk systematically explored both nontheatrical sites (churches, gyms, museums, fields, lakes, parking lots), and nonproscenium per- forming spaces, such as the La MaMa Annex, various Soho lofts, MoMing (an experimental performance space in Chicago), and BAM’s Leperq Space (now the BAM restaurant). Monk has also appeared alone, for example, in on the huge Town Hall Stage in Our Lady of Late, singing an hour-long solo, accompanying herself with only the drone from a single wineglass. Monk said, “I feel I am having a dialogue with the space. It’s a main structuring element” (in Baker :). The theatri- cal space, whether it was a crumbling urban vista, a rock quarry, or a lighthouse, became a player. Also in , Monk created Education of the Girlchild for an en-
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1054204053971054 by guest on 24 September 2021 Nancy Putnam Smithner semble of six women. She provided the dramatic struc- ture and wrote the music, but the individuality of each performer was of great importance. Each actress devel- oped her own role, and drew upon her own family background, childhood, social, and racial experiences. The group evoked familiar artistic or literary types: the goddess, the mother, the warrior, the mad woman, the murderer. In her solo piece, which comprised the second half of the show, Monk used transformation, repetition, and multiple characterizations. She moved backward in time: the same movements that were performed with arthritic stiffness as an old woman were repeated pow- erfully as the same woman many years younger, then with ease, as a young girl. Monk sang in a minor key in a kind of moan/chant/wail. As described by Eileen Stodolsky:
These are the inarticulate cries of a peasant woman in mourning, of a mother crying for her dead children—or of an old woman violently protesting the bitter truths of her thwarted and wasted life. Wordless sorrow, deepest despair— the undulating sounds twist their way into one’s soul, and bring tears to the eyes, although not a word has been uttered. (:)
5. & 6. Education of the In these characterizations—not realistic but abstract— Girlchild (1973) at the 1975 Monk summoned up a multitude of emotions, evoking in the audience fore- Venice Biennale.Above, bodings, memories, and prophecies. Meredith Monk; below, Monk continued to explore the complex layering of elements in Quarry. The from left, Blondell people in the cast wove a tapestry of Holocaust imagery incorporating music, fi Cummings, Coco Pekelis, speeches, short dialogue scenes, singing-dancing choruses, processions, and lm. Lanny Harrison, Meredith Monk, playing a child, lay on a quilt in the center of the stage, where she was Monk, Lee Nagrin, and Monica Moseley.(Photos by Lorenzo Cappellini; courtesy of The House Foundation for the Arts)
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1054204053971054 by guest on 24 September 2021 Meredith Monk surrounded by four intimate scenes or “stations”—an older, well-dressed couple in a parlor; three women dressed as workers at a dinner table; a mother sitting next to a picture of soldier on a desk; and a couple in flowing robes sitting on a straw mat (described as “The Old Testament Couple” in the credits). The actions in these tableaux shift from realistic and mundane behaviors such as eating, con- versing, and handling everyday objects, to dramatically loaded actions such as swaying, flailing, falling, and writhing. The contrast between motion and still- ness, the use of repetition and variety, and the juxtaposition of the scenic actions brought forth the horror of war filtered through a child’s point of view—“the shrinking of the child’s circle of security in an immense world to one tiny spot, her own bed” (Siegel :). The child’s dream gradually mutates into a night- mare of war, as members of the chorus move through the space, holding cutouts of planes and clouds aloft on poles, alternately chanting, falling, and shooting. Ruling this dystopic world is a ranting dictator portrayed by Ping Chong.
Monk describes her work on a section called “The Rally” where soldiers exercise rigorously and run between the stations: It was based on the Nazi youth thing—about developing your body into something hard. I took the simplest things, exercises done in violent ways and very guttural kinds of sounds; in one way, the scene is seductive, and in another it’s horrifying. (in Pareles :)
According to Monk, no element sacrificed its individual integrity for the whole. Rather it was the use of contradictory images that comprised the whole. By the Brechtian placement of familiar elements in new contexts, Monk altered estab- lished viewpoints, and created a nonlinear way of dealing with historical events. Often Monk’s images revolve around a home or a tightly structured commu- nity where people eat, or cook, or converse around a table. Characters collectively perform rites of passage—births and deaths. Monk delves into the collective his- torical memory of big events and epochs: the Holocaust, World War II, medieval times, and immigration. Shapiro points out that Monk is astute at manipulating cultural mythology and also at inventing folk songs of a fictional culture (). But while Monk’s themes may include the inevitability of epidemics, wars, and the hostile forces of nature, she finds solace in showing how people enjoy ordinary daily pleasures and the warmth of community. Monk appears to have found her own community in her ensemble. She says of herself:
I was a person who left home at fourteen, and then hated family for years. I wanted nothing to do with family. But because I had a not-so-easy fam- ily life, I guess I wanted to invent a new idea of family. [...] I still think community is what we mean by family. (in Robinson :)
Monk moved beyond The House in as she developed her own voice to produce an enormous range of sound. She recalls:
Somehow I had the kind of spirit that needed to find new ways. I wanted to make my own work, explore things, discover things—and one day at the piano, doing straight vocalizing, I realized the voice could have the same kind of flexibility and range that the body has. You could find a lan- guage for the voice that had the same individuality as a dancer’s movement [... T]hat really excited me, and right from the exercises I started branch- ing out. That was the beginning. (in Strickland :)
She began to teach her techniques to others. She also began to distrust theatre: “All that hiding behind ‘the fourth wall’ [...;] I began to think of music concerts
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1054204053971054 by guest on 24 September 2021 Nancy Putnam Smithner 7. Filming Ellis Island, 1979. Left to right: John Bollinger,associate producer; Bob Rosen, producer and codirector; Jerry Pantzer, camera; John Sennhauser, actor; Meredith Monk, director; Lee Nagrin, actor. (Courtesy of The House Foundation for the Arts)
as more honest” (). Monk felt the need to work on a highly technical level; she auditioned trained singers for the chorus for Quarry. She recalls: “I chose young people who were really good singers, as well as good dancers. I chose them for how well they sang, as well as for how well they moved—so I could make very complicated choral things for them.”From those Monk selected the three strongest singers—Andrea Goodman, Susan Campi, and Monica Solon—form- ing in the first grouping of Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble. The Vocal Ensemble provided a way for Monk to experiment with her inno- vative vocal techniques. Like a dance troupe or a choir, it demanded the rigors of regular rehearsal and performance schedules. One of the Ensemble’s first per- formances was Dolmen Music () at The Kitchen in New York. Monk said at the time:“My main concerns have been to work with the unique quality of each voice and to play with the ensemble possibilities of unison, texture, counterpoint, weaving [...]” (in Tellberg :). The piece, reprised in at City Center, was described by music critic Gregory Sandow as:
an ensemble piece, for six singers and cello, in which the idea of ensemble is as important as anything else [...;] the result is real group music, in which textures are created by some or all the voices singing together, without the division into solo and accompaniment. ()
Also in , Specimen Days:A Civil War Opera combined ensemble performance with compositionally complex music. Erika Munk wrote: “The performers are astonishing. They sing, dance, and enact their specimen roles in such a way that little connections, repetitions, significances are neatly, gesturally made” (:). Monk had achieved her goal of transmitting her vocal technique to her ensemble. In the s, The House became the umbrella organization for all of Monk’s productions even as the Vocal Ensemble became the focus of Monk’s creativity. In she and Bob Rosen finished their work on Ellis Island, filmed on site in the then derelict customs buildings. The performers were dressed as immigrants and filmed in various solo and group scenes throughout the ruins. Monk then embarked on five more duet collaborations. The first, in , was The Games with Ping Chong, a longtime associate and partner with whom she had created The Travelogue Series in –. Because Monk didn’t have a lot of vocal music
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1054204053971054 by guest on 24 September 2021 Meredith Monk in the piece and Chong did not use his audiovisual slides, Monk believes that in creating this large-scale theatrical piece:“There was a sense of renouncing aspects of ourselves to create a third thing” (). With an ensemble of performers, they developed The Games at the Schaubuhne am Halleschen Wer, in West Berlin, where Monk in restaged Vessel with a cast of performers. The Games was “a parable about a post-nuclear society struggling to present the vestiges of civi- lization in the mechanical repetition of half-remembered rituals” (Moritz :). Monk recalls: “By the time we got to The Games, Ping and I were going in two very different directions, so that was more challenging as a collaborative process” (). Monk went on to delve more deeply into her vocal work and Chong focused on the further development of his own company and the expansion of multimedia works. In , Monk worked with Harrison, also a longtime collaborator, on Acts from Under and Above—a duet using humor, visual wit, and slapstick—which was a cross between Monk’s concert works and her more theatrical pieces. In , she performed Duet Behavior with pop and jazz icon Bobby McFerrin at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Monk wrote a complex vocal exchange for one part of this duet, but McFerrin, who prefers to improvise, did not have time to rehearse. They compromised and sang all the notes in unison. Monk, who prefers not to totally improvise, jokingly called the piece “Dependent Duet.” In , Monk developed Fayum Music with pianist Nurit Tilles, performed in 8. Mary Shultz and Robert Town Hall. Bob Rosen had been commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Een in Ellis Island filmed Art to do a film about the Fayum portraits. Tilles played hammer dulcimer and on location.This image Monk played a double ocarina, creating what Monk felt was “a very ancient kind appears in both a silent of sound,” to complement Rosen’s film about the portraits (). In , she 7-minute film shot in 1979, worked with another longtime collaborator, singer and musician Robert Een, to and a 28-minute film with create Facing North, which was based on material she had developed in Banff, Al- soundtrack from 1981. Ellis berta, Canada, while watching the snow fall. She laid down tracks and then came Island was also screened to New York and taught him the material. But it was only during rehearsal, as during Monk’s opera, Monk puts it, that “things developed” (). Facing North is about the interde- Recent Ruins (1979). pendence of two people in a barren and difficult landscape. Their interaction (Photo by Jerry Panzer; seems to exist outside of time, as they move in slow motion on a stark white stage. courtesy of The House Monk is very open in noting that some of these duets Foundation for the Arts) were on an equal footing—her work with Chong and McFerrin—while for others she generated the concept, where she was, in her own words, the “benevolent dic- tator” (). Monk describes collaboration as:
.% of the time negotiating how to work to- gether and .% making the piece. In a very equal collaboration, there are two pillars around the door, and then it is what you are willing to let go of to make something else happen that you wouldn’t do yourself. ()
In , David Gockley, director of the Houston Grand Opera, frustrated by problems created by the star system, commissioned Monk to create Atlas:An Opera in Three Parts (). This gave Monk the chance to re- formulate how to work with a large ensemble. She was accustomed to working with colleagues who were used to responding to her unusual demands: “singers who could move and deal with the stage spatially, which is something they are never asked to do; or, on the other
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9. Tur tle Dreams (Waltz) (1981) at City Center,New York City.Left to right: Paul Langland, Meredith Monk, Robert Een,Andrea Goodman, and Gail Turner. (Photo by Johan Elbers; courtesy of The House Foundation for the Arts)
10. The Games (1983) directed by Meredith Monk and Ping Chong at Schaubuhne in West Berlin. (Photo by Ruth Walz; courtesy of The House Foundation for the Arts)
hand, dancers who are fine singers” (). But opera was different. Monk audi- tioned more than singers, honing the cast to , four of whom she had worked with before. The audition process took six months. The performers were chosen for the quality of their voices, for having a strong sense of rhythmic ar- ticulation, and for being willing to work in an ensemble. Monk says she was looking carefully at “the human being and the quality of generosity and open- heartedness that the people had. That’s very, very important to me” (). A large portion of Atlas’s $, budget was spent on rehearsal time to weld the cast into an ensemble. Monk said of her urge to form an ensemble:“It was an unusual situation for an opera company, but I preferred more money for re- hearsals and less for production elements. I’d rather squeeze on scenery and get
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1054204053971054 by guest on 24 September 2021 Meredith Monk my rehearsal process.”She recalled that the opera singers’ agents called the Hous- ton Grand Opera asking:“‘How many pages is my client singing? Because they’re going to get paid that way.’ And I’d say ‘You have to totally throw away this model, because that is not what we are doing at all’” (). As in many of Monk’s other works, there was no fixed soloist-chorus relationship, and a per- former who had a leading part in one scene might be a member of the ensemble in another. Monk began working with the cast in July toward a February open- ing. The first month had no goal except to become comfortable as a company. After a month’s work, Monk discontinued rehearsals in order to compose the piece. After a break of several months, the ensemble got together again in No- vember to shape the piece. Monk had to train the group to adjust to her meth- ods of collaborative exchange in creating material, as well as helping her to expand her musical and theatrical language, asking them to perform a vocabulary of moans, grunts, howls, animal-like calls, insect buzzes, gulping glottal clicks and growls, keening ululations, stuttered monosyllables, whispers, gurgles, yodel- like register shifts, and vibrato manipulations. Vela, who was assistant director, re- calls:“Some took a little while to adapt, and others didn’t. But there were mainly very highly trained musicians and singers. Somehow we were really able to zero in on what they had in common with Meredith and this way of working” (). Atlas is unique in Monk’s work in that it has a conventional structure and tells a linear story: a girl who feels confined in her home life strikes out on a quest. This female explorer, played by Monk, has confrontations with spirits from other worlds, which are according to Monk “her own social and psychological demons” (). Collaborating with Vela and Yashio Yabara, the art director, Monk cre- ated visual landscapes that transformed from domestic scenes—a mother ironing, a father with a pipe in an armchair, a girl in her bedroom—to an agricultural community dressed in capes of grass, an arctic environment with ice demons and huge rocks, a jungle atmosphere controlled by a wise old seer, and other settings, such as an airport, a bar, a forest, a desert. Atlas embodied a recurring theme in Monk’s work: balancing realistic actions against surrealistic ones, all sustained by a complex musical score. Max Loppert wrote of the Atlas ensemble: “It can be charged with infinite subtly expressive inflection or storytelling, especially since the singers have all been schooled to extend their vocal lines with similarly ex- pressive physical mime at the right moment” (). According to Vela, with Atlas, Monk’s focus changed drastically, with the mu- sic coming “very much front and center” (). Vocally, Monk prefers to avoid conventional text and work with a language of what she terms “vocables,” wherein the listener is given the opportunity for a personal experience rather than being forced to pay attention to a prescribed piece of music. Her concept that the voice has its own language which can impart universal meanings is similar to how Jerzy Grotowski thought about language. Grotowski spoke of “an elementary language of signs and sound comprehensible beyond the semantic value of the word even to a person who does not under- stand the language in which the play is performed” (:). Monk says:
The language of the voice is so deep and so direct to feelings for which we don’t have words, energies for which we don’t have words, physicality for which we don’t have words—and so you’re delineating states that are much more difficult to get to verbally. ()
In working with her own voice, Monk came upon sounds that she feels are “trans- cultural,” such as chants, yodels, hums, clicks, and glottal throat singing, as well as universal modes of singing such as the lament and the lullaby. She feels strongly
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11. Ensemble members in American Archaeology connected to what she calls the “world vocal family.” Stuart Cohn of Music Mag- # (1994). Performed by azine said of Monk’s vocal work:“It’s a language so eloquent that she doesn’t need Shizheng Chen, Dina lyrics to convey minute mental and emotional states” (:). Emerson,Victoria In her American Archaeology #1, Monk’s voice was amplified as she sang Boomsma,Theo Bleckmann, atop a lighthouse on New York’s Roosevelt Island surrounded by an ensemble of Carlos Arévalo,Tom performers. American Archaeology #1 was shown in two parts: in the afternoon Bogdan, Janis Brenner, as pedestrians gamboled in Lighthouse Park; and in the evening, when the ruins Katie Geissinger on of the Renwick smallpox hospital were lit eerily from within. Roosevelt Island. (Photo by In The Politics of Quiet: A Music Theater Oratorio () Monk focused on the Dona Ann McAdams; individuality of her singers: each contributed his or her own musical phrases. Pol- courtesy of The House itics was the only ensemble piece Monk wrote without a part for herself. Usually, Foundation for the Arts) she performed—and when she was onstage, she sometimes had a problem giv- ing up being the director. In Monk said:
These years I have a different feeling. I enjoy just, as a performer, letting go of that directorial thing. Once I have the piece I feel like it’s itself. I re- member one time in Girlchild when Lanny [Harrison] bit my arm because I was such a director onstage. It just pissed her off and she had a good rea- son to be, because once you get on there, you have to be as vulnerable as
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Chronology of Major Works by Meredith Monk
Break 16 Millimeter Earrings Juice:A Theatre Cantata Vessel:An Opera Epic Our Lady of Late Education of the Girlchild Quarry Dolmen Music Ellis Island Tu r tle Dreams: Cabaret Book of Days Book of Days (film) Facing North Atlas:An Opera in Three Parts The Politics of Quiet:A Music Theater Oratorio Magic Frequencies—A Science Fiction Chamber Opera mercy Possible Sky
your performers, in terms of your performing, you can’t be the director there, you have to go in there and be in the same room that they are. ()
Monk feels that now she has more control when she is performing: “I prefer to have my energy in there, than sit out there and be tortured in the audience, where I can’t do anything” (). In Magic Frequencies—A Science Fiction Chamber Opera (), Monk worked with members from the original House, as well as with people from Atlas. The two units blended well. In Frequencies she elaborated on “hocketing,” a th-century vocal technique featuring an exchange between two singers, each singer con-
12. Meredith Monk’s The Politics of Quiet (1996). Front to back:Tom Bogdan,Allison Easter, Katie Geissinger, Ching Gonzalez,Theo Bleckmann, Dina Emerson, Carlos Arévalo, Stephen Kalm, Janis Brenner,and Randy Wong at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. (Photo by Virgile Bertrand; courtesy of The House Foundation for the Arts)
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13. Magic Frequencies (1998) at Jacob’s Pillow, Becket, MA. Standing: Katie Geissinger,Lanny Harrison,Theo Bleckmann; seated: Meredith Monk and Ching Gonzalez. (Photo by Clemens Kalischer; courtesy of The House Foundation for the Arts)
tributing one “word” to a long melodic “sentence.” Done well, hocketing pro- duces an effect where two notes seem to almost overlap and jostle uncannily against each other in the air. Monk first attempted hocketing in Dolmen Music () wherein overlapping voices continually cut each other off. She developed it further in The Ringing Place (), and used it again in Facing North (). In the last act of Atlas she created a complex hocket for six people. In Magic Fre- quencies she and Ching Gonzalez conversed in song, rapidly tossing tones across a kitchen table, evoking a couple talking while eating. Gonzalez recalled that they used to call this hocket “the torture song” when they were learning it because of the difficulty of sustaining the intonation and keeping the rhythmic variations while maintaining the form. This kitchen table setting in Magic Frequencies was part of what Monk called the “earth scenes,” tableaux depicting everyday life on earth while other per- formers portrayed aliens peering into the domestic world. The aliens sang in a kind of hiccupping counterpoint. Sometimes, driven by curiosity, they reached toward the kitchen table to sample some corn on the cob. Other scenes in Fre- quencies alternate the humorous and the disturbing, ranging from a duet in a shop- ping mall to the sickbed of a dying man who sees people from his life passing before him. Typical of Monk, the piece is nonlinear and surrealist, creating a sense of childlike wonder and play. In , Monk collaborated with visual artist Anne Hamilton and the Vocal Ensemble on mercy. Hamilton agreed to appear in the initial performances, and thus rehearsed with the group. Most of her work was with Monk, however, in forming the concepts for the piece. Monk commented:“Our work has got a lot in common, the feeling of it, the depth, the mystery of it, the quiet of it. But how we get there’s really different, so it’s been a pretty interesting dialogue—I’m time-space and she’s space-time” (in Scherr :). Monk recalled that she came in with ideas, but Hamilton wasn’t interested in them, so they began in “that same boat of nothingness.” They each agreed to be in charge of different aspects of the production, Monk relinquishing the video element and taking control of the cho- reography and music, while Hamilton took charge of the space. In making mercy,
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1054204053971054 by guest on 24 September 2021 Meredith Monk the two artists reflected on the meaning of the word “mercy”:“Ann and I wanted to convey, through a sense of being quiet, which we both tend to express, the na- ture of healing that is inherent in the concept of mercy” (). In her collaboration with Hamilton, Monk discovered new ways to use mul- timedia to convey mysterious, quiet, and subtle moods. From the start of her artistic career, Monk has used multimedia. In 16 Millimeter Earrings () she employed a filmic overlay. She also used film in Quarry () and Recent Ruins (). In mercy, Monk hung a large scrim across the back of the entire stage and projected intense colors, shadows of the dancing performers, distorted video im- ages of faces and mouths, a pencil as it drew a line endlessly across the stage, and ominous pieces of text that scrolled away to a vanishing point. At times, Monk held a tiny video camera in her mouth, and the huge image of the face across from her was projected on the screen, such as when Theo Bleckman, portraying a doctor, leaned down to examine her. At one point, Hamilton created gigantic bubble formations from a curtain of long vertical strings (made of monofiliment or fishing wire) coated with liquid soap. As the soap strings quietly descended to the stage, the performers manipu- lated, blew, and sang into them. Mark Swed wrote in the Los Angeles Times: “There is sheer magic in the scene in which Hamilton makes Monk’s syllabic song visible by causing the breath of two singers to release bubbles from watery curtains.” Through such devices, Monk conveyed images of loss, fear, and vul- nerability. Ching Gonzalez danced a prisoner trapped in a box of light; Katie Geisinger played a lonely woman who greets a chorus of overcoated refugees as they appear from the back of the theatre and file onto the stage. These are not fully developed characters, but personae who form a collage of disquieting, poi- gnant images. The show mercy toured nationally throughout / before it came to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in December of . The original company for mercy included Harrison, Gonzalez, Bleckman, Geissinger, John Hollenbeck, and Allison Sniffen. Monk said of the mercy ensemble that they “are extraordinary young singers who can technically do just about anything. Virtuosity is second nature to them” (). Bleckman points out that the members of the ensemble all have very different backgrounds and very individual ideas of what movement and acting are:
We have a real modern dancer, a very schooled actress, an operatic singer—and I think Meredith’s strength is to find a common ground for all of that without destroying it, without being military-style, but finding what this movement really means and then teaching it to everybody from the inside out. ()
Directing Process Monk’s roles as performer, creator, and director are very much interrelated. Her compositional process begins and ends intuitively, but expands and solidifies through a rigorous rehearsal and editing process. She composes the way a chore- ographer does, grafting her material onto living bodies, creating imagery and roles to fit cast members’ vocal attributes, special talents, and stage presence. Deb- orah Jowitt, who observed rehearsals of Atlas, said that Monk, who plays the cen- tral role:
fairly burrows into a rehearsal, trying her own part, then sitting out and watching. She might then step into someone else’s part then pause to refer
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14. Meredith Monk and doctor in mercy, a collaboration with Ann Hamilton (2001) at the American Dance Festival, Duke University,Durham, NC. (Photo by Bernard Thomas; courtesy of The House Foundation for the Arts)
to a first-draft cassette tape of a song, while calling out directives: “Re- member you’re icebergs, not skiers!” (:)
Normally in the building of a piece, the company has three to four weeks to play and improvise together, spending much of this time in an artistic retreat in concentrated rehearsal. Then there is a break, which can vary from one to six months depending on the logistics of Monk’s performance schedule, before they come together again. During the break, Monk revises the songs, texts, or com- positions, and writes new material based on the interactions of the ensemble. Then the group reconvenes for another intensive period of final rehearsals. Bleckman compared the company’s lengthy process to work that is made in two weeks: “The timing is very important and it’s a very hard process that a lot of people avoid because it’s very slow and painful—you have to work very diligently and always ask yourself, ‘Is this the closest to the truth that I can come with this material?’” Harrison described how elements transformed and evolved as she worked on a character called “Spirit of Death” in Quarry:
I just worked on this crazy costume of rags and I just kept on putting more blood on it. We found this rubber knife, and I bloodied up this thing that I wore on my head and I just came in as this spirit of war. And it changed a lot. At first I sort of came in this George Washington, or Martha Washington costume, and that got axed. Meredith and I both didn’t like that, and then I came up with the rags thing and that was bet- ter. ()
Monk seems to relish these exchanges with members of her ensemble. She in- sists: “My rehearsals are [...] definitely not about a dictator and her followers, by any means. There is a very anarchistic atmosphere—a funny anarchistic atmos- phere. It’s very lively and there is a lot of give and take. I really like that” (in Robinson :). In rehearsals of mercy, several of which I observed in , Monk had a per- former who was not in the ensemble stand by in order to step into her role so
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1054204053971054 by guest on 24 September 2021 Meredith Monk she could observe the stage picture. Monk led the vocal group in a complicated canon, while across the room Harrison worked solo, moving in front of a video camera. Later the entire ensemble came together to practice the choreography of “the walk” and “the head shaking,”which was videotaped by an assistant because Monk was in it. The group then viewed the video, analyzed it, and offered Monk both encouragement and advice. They then got on their feet and tried it again, all the while maintaining their sense of humor. Monk will often begin to work, as she did for Magic Frequencies (), with lists of ideas and pieces of music. She recalls: “They were like tiles of a mosaic, and as I worked with them in rehearsal, exploring them—particularly the music tiles—other things were revealed” (in Robinson :). Monk refers to her- self as a mosaicist, believing that one shard of experience, or a line, or an image, filtered through her own experience, might become part of a whole. She differ- entiates this from a collage artist, who pieces together actual stories, pictures, or events. She believes, however, that artists should be able to use whatever is at their disposal. Like Duchamp, Monk finds “readymade” items—and the objects migrate from one context to the next, sometimes changing size, changing their signifance as they move: “I use them like notes on a musical score—it’s like using it as an overlay, a transparency that gradually discloses several levels of the object itself” (in McNamara :). For example, in The Games, Monk projected images of buttons, a glove, a razor, a comb, a pair of pliers, channel locks, a clothespin, a fork, a knife, a spoon, and a lightbulb behind the stage action. To create a sense of historical displacement in the film Book of Days (), set in the middle ages, a young girl draws common objects from modern times such as a bus, a gun, and an airplane—but she doesn’t know what she is drawing. An unseen TV com- mentator asks questions of other medieval characters, such as “What is a radia- tor?” and “Are you athletic?” To create presence onstage, the actors appear as impersonal and historical ar- chetypal personas in stark settings, such as a dictator, a monk, or a doctor. Monk says: “I’m very much interested in magic, very much interested in transcending realities, with multi-dimensional realities [...] and definitely I’m not afraid of emotion. You know, a lively emotional life” (in Forte :). Monk’s own performance style is internal, delicate, yet powerful, not necessarily “lively” or “emotional.” She wants to draw the audience in rather than throw energy out at them. Monk explains:“I hate seeing the ‘acting’ in traditional acting. That’s why I wanted to work with people that did not have the skills” (). Monk chooses performers who are open and versatile:
I’ve always tried to follow a vision of performers being very fluid between mediums, of finding ways of having a performer be an actor and then a singer and then a dancer and then a person who does tasks and then back to an actor, or all of them at the same time. ()
In her own way, Monk demands virtuosity from her performers. In mercy, the performers move across the floor doing complicated dance steps while singing an intricate song with elaborate harmonic exchanges. Even as she makes huge de- mands on them, Monk wants her performers to maintain their individuality as well as their own creative identities:“[S]he encourages them to leave her as soon as she senses that they perceive her as a barrier to their creative expansion” ( Jowitt :). Indeed, Monk has passed on the urge to perform and the legacy to cre- ate to numerous company members who have moved on or continue to make their own work, such as Harrison, Langland, Een, Bleckman, Chong, Ellen Fischer (who has since returned to work on mercy and The Impermanence Project []),
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1054204053971054 by guest on 24 September 2021 Nancy Putnam Smithner Andrea Goodman, Blondell Cummings, Lee Nagrin, Dina Emerson, and others. Because Monk’s rehearsal process demands vulnera- bility and personal commitment from each performer, she is careful in choosing her collaborators. Monk draws upon the strengths of each individual performer: “It comes from realizing that human beings are not paints, they’re full human beings and to see their whole radiance as individuals is, in a certain way, part of the structure of the piece” (). Monk makes the final selection of material, however, and perhaps one ges- ture, one movement, one phrase, or a whole scene may be shaped by the ensemble. Vela enjoys working in this 15.Toby Newman and Pablo style: “It’s a very collaborative thing, and you feel very attached to the material, Vela in the 1988 film Book because some of it is your material, or material you’ve created along with some- of Days. (Photo by one else in the cast. You feel possessive about it” (). Because the personality Dominique Lasseur; courtesy of each performer is inseparable from the formation of the piece, it is difficult to of The House Foundation replace members of the ensemble. In the summer of , Monk learned that for the Arts) Katie Geisinger had accepted a Broadway role and would have to be replaced in mercy at BAM. Monk told me, “I deeply mourned the loss of Katie, who I adore, then I adapted to the change and moved forward” (). The role was per- formed by Alexandra Montano, who precisely took on Geisinger’s part, yet added her own emotional palette to the complex vocal score. Many times a performer’s concepts will not be used. And even ideas that are used are often reshaped. Bleckman says he couldn’t work with Monk if he was possessive about his ideas: “I have to give every idea that comes to my head that I think is valid, it’s my responsibility to help give birth to this piece. Otherwise it’s just holding back, calculating what I need to keep for myself. It makes no sense” (). There are many implicit agreements operating in the ensemble. When Vela began work as assistant director on Atlas, he says he was so used to Monk’s way of working that: “I just knew what the procedure was. I fell flat on my face a couple of times, but I just knew how to fit into the process—when to be passive, and when to put in my two cents. It’s a fine line” (). He also helped Monk with Politics of Quiet () by taking on special tasks such as work- ing with the children, and with A Celebration Service () by compiling sacred texts from different historical periods. But for all the collaboration, Monk’s particular theatrical aesthetic and vision rules each work’s music, choreography, sets, costumes, lighting, sound, film, and video. She even sees to the design calligraphy of most of the flyers, posters, and programs. According to her administrative assistants, she never throws anything away, recycling them or adapting visual aspects of her work. One can recognize themes recurring over the years: journeying—the migration of a family of white clad women in Education of Girlchild, the explorers in Facing North and Atlas, and the alien space travelers in Magic Frequencies; displaced persons or refugee types reappear in Ellis Island, Quarry, and mercy. Bits of choreography might reappear as well, such as the very silly dance in Facing North, where Monk and Een bounce up and down, intoning “singa, dinga,” then she falls sideways onto his bent leg and he deflects her off. This bit was seen again in Atlas, performed by pairs in a large ensemble. In my conversations with Monk, she reflected upon how her directing style has changed over the years:
My way of working now is to trust right from the very beginning. It took me years to work this out because I came from a ballet background, a bal-
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1054204053971054 by guest on 24 September 2021 Meredith Monk let master mentality. I was trained to think that by terrorizing people they’d do better [...;] that’s how you got results. Over the years I’ve learned that when you do the opposite so much can come back to you in the commitment and passion with which people work. An ensemble’s give-and-take is really about a generosity of spirit. ()
According to Gonzalez: “She is very resistant to being the controller [...;] she prefers to have the piece sort of materialize on its own because of the input we put in, rather than saying ‘this is the outline [...] now do this or that’” ().
New Directions Monk is always searching for a challenge, a new way of creating: “For me the joy is in breaking down categories, finding new hybrid forms or discovering the place where things resonate with each other” (). She makes a point to begin each project unconstrained by the patterns created by previous works, challenging herself to enter new territory in terms of themes, sounds, techniques, and staging:
Often when I start a new piece I’m in terror, agony. I don’t know what it’s fl going to be; I’m in the dark and I’m ailing around. I have an instinct and 16. Meredith Monk in the an intuition—but my idea is to start from zero every time, and not just do film Book of Days (1988). another Meredith Monk piece. (in Wallach : ) (Photo by Dominique Lasseur; courtesy of The She received a new challenge when she was commissioned by Michael Tilson House Foundation for Thomas to write an orchestral piece for the New World Symphony. Possible Sky, the Arts) her first scoring for orchestra, had its world premiere in the spring of in Mi- ami. Monk calls Possible Sky a prayer, which centers on the “healing power of art.” In Possible Sky she wanted to explore “the humanity of the orchestra” (). Composing a piece for players was not easy. “It took me four years, three years of shaking in the fetal position.” While it was expected that Monk would build some improvisation into the work, much of the composition had to be set. Monk focused on getting the same kind of idiosyncratic personal quality out of the instruments as she has done with the voice. She asked the New World Symphony’s young musicians to find new sounds. She sang phrases for them to play on their instruments in unaccustomed ways. “I’d bring them something that sounded really unusual vocally and the instruments would often make it sound more conventional” (). In the first half of the evening Monk performed a series of virtuoso solos from previ- ous works. These included “Insect Songs,” where she seemed to transform into various insects; “Click Song I & II,” where she sang in different timbres and pitches while simultaneously clicking her tongue; and an ex- cerpt from Songs from the Hill Tablet (), where she sang while playing the Jew’s harp. Then, after several duets with Bleckman and a trio with Bleckman and Al- ison Sniffen, members of the New World Symphony danced an uncharacteristic group two-step and did the “Panda Chant” with Monk. The second half of the program featured an orches-
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1054204053971054 by guest on 24 September 2021 Nancy Putnam Smithner tral work with Monk and Bleckman standing amid the orchestra and singing. Pos- sible Sky is a series of episodes in which the instruments use some special timbre— an electronic sound from violins, xylophone-like reverberation from a flute, and a muted trumpet reminiscent of Monk’s own high-pitched keening. According to Matthew Westphal, “Sounds piled on top of each other, a bit too thickly.” He felt that many of these episodes were “like lush rainforests of sounds flowing and blooming toward your ear from every side” (). Not everyone was happy with the piece. Music critic Lawrence Johnson of the Miami Sun Sentinel wrote that Pos- sible Sky was “a series of improvised sequences strung together sounding unfocused and aimless, proving no great work of music was ever created by a committee,” but yet having “striking passages, unique timbral effects and even a few moving moments” (). Monk sees the piece as a work-in-progress. Monk’s presence in the art world is not limited to music venues. She has been included in several installations in art museums, including Eclipse Variations (), a sound installation at the Whitney, and Show People: Downtown Directors and the Play of Time at Exit Art in Soho () where Monk was featured along with Anne Bogart, Richard Foreman, Peter Schumann, Robert Wilson, and the late Reza Abdoh. The exhibit focused on directors whose work has a strong vi- sual aesthetic. The directors were asked to portray themselves as young artists first starting to make a career in New York, and to trace how their early ideas were still present in their work. According to Exit Art cofounder, Papo Colo: “The kids coming in don’t find this stuff dated at all—they’re saying, ‘This is now’” (in Russo :). This suits Monk because she is very interested in talking to young people about her artistic goal of breaking down boundaries. She also is concerned with passing on the heritage of her music and, toward that end, is trying to find a way to notate her intricate scores, which have always been taught in rehearsal aurally. Paul Langland recalled working on the premiere of Dolmen Music: “It was unscored, done with a tape recorder. Meredith would come in with melodies, and she’d have ideas on how to flush them out, we’d improvise a little bit.” Lang- land felt “you would have to reappraise the whole musical notation system in or- der to write it down [...;] it would be difficult to just look at the score and sing it, because the timings are so difficult, and the measures and the meters change so frequently” (). Langland sang Dolmen Music again at Monk’s retrospective in at Lincoln Center. In , Monk recreated Quarry at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina. She used many of The House’s original ensemble members, and also taught the choreography and the songs to local performers. While she jokingly refers to this production as “the geriatric version,” Monk found that she went more deeply into the essence of “the child” than ever before. Monk likes to re- turn to older work: “The thing that is beautiful about live performance is you could look at a piece after not performing it for a long time, it’s the same piece, but it’s grown and changed” (). Audiences have grown and changed for Monk as well. She has gone from per- forming in her Great Jones Street loft to institutional venues in the USA, for ex- ample at Lincoln Center for her retrospective or at the opening of Carnegie Hall’s new Zankel Hall in . Monk also has an international audience, having toured extensively. In Europe, her music is better known than her theatre work. She and her Vocal Ensemble have performed in recent years in Holland, Belgium, Ireland, France, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Estonia, Russia, China, and Singapore. She feels, ultimately, that her vocal work is the heart of what she does:“If you see a music concert you get everything I have to say, even if you see a solo concert, except it’s in a smaller and more pure form, and then the images in the theatre works and the multimedia works are just another layer” (). Another new venture took place in November at St. Mark’s Church in
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1054204053971054 by guest on 24 September 2021 Meredith Monk New York: choreographers—Ann Carlson, Sean Curran, Molissa Fenley, Bill T. Jones, Dana Reitz, Doug Varone, Eiko and Koma, Lar Lubovitch, Phoebe Neville, and Elizabeth Streb—celebrated years of Monk’s work by premier- ing new works set to Monk’s music. Monk maintains an office in midtown Manhattan from which she runs the House Foundation, schedules engagements, and keeps her archive. There isn’t much real money in any of this. Maintaining a theatre company that creates orig- inal works in in New York City is a labor of love:“The only reason for do- ing work is that you might have the joy of that kind of discovery on a day-to-day level. The only reason for doing it is really that you love doing it” (Monk in Roose-Evans :). As we finished one of our last interviews in her Tribeca loft, Monk quickly dressed while she talked, preparing to leave for her alma mater, Sarah Lawrence, where she would audition students for a remounting of The Plateau Series (). She had been at Julliard the day before, lecturing and talking to students about art and society. She reflected that since the sudden death in of her partner of years, Mieke van Hoek, she has been delving into the concept of imper- manence, the subject of her new work:“When Mieke died, I just had this vision of no separation between spiritual practice and making art. Which I have always done, but now am doing it with more awareness” (). Monk now focuses her work on fundamental themes such as change, loss, and death, and on exploring art as healing. Her ensemble work The Imperma- nence Project was part of a festival organized by Rosetta Life, a London-based char- ity that sends artists into hospices all over England. The goal is not to entertain, but to explore with the patients, through art, the process of dying. In October and June , Monk worked in a London hospice leading workshops and listening to stories. The Impermanence Project explores the fragility of human life. What are the last things people do before they die? What regrets do the dying feel? What do people leave behind when they die? There is voice, music, and movement. As in earlier works, Monk uses mundane gestures and pedestrian actions, which slowly transform into surrealistic shapes, where characters seem to balance or float su- pernaturally, shifting weight in slow motion. Haunting vocal work surrounds the action, such as “Disequilibrium Song,” full of wild howling, and “Last Song,” based on James Hellman’s words in Force of Character (), a book about aging. The Ensemble sings highly charged phrases—“last chance,” “last time,” “last sight”—accompanied by a series of piano chords. The music gradually falls into silence as the words stop. In January , Monk’s first composition for strings was premiered by the Kronos Quartet at the Barbican Center in London. In this work Monk explores new sound textures for stringed instruments, working closely with the Kronos players. Fed by her Tibetan Buddhist practice and her depth of artistic experience, she feels that she has found a new clear and inspired artistic energy: “I’ve chosen to live a life that has a lot of risk involved on every level. But I no longer worry about proving myself, I have accepted who I am and I feel very, very fortunate to be absorbed in my art form” (). She feels that throughout her career she has been on a path that led her step by step toward this most recent phase of work. She has arrived by design and by accident: “I had to invent my own traditions, stumbling around in the dark, following impulses, like a detective” ().While Monk’s career has never been predictable, one thing is certain—she has made an enormous contribution to the musical and performative aesthetics of our time. She will undoubtedly, in the decades to come, continue to explore new themes, sounds and images, juggling multiple projects, and delving into worlds that are al- ternately mundane and archetypal, familiar and strange.
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1054204053971054 by guest on 24 September 2021 Nancy Putnam Smithner Notes . All quotes from Monk, unless otherwise referenced, are from personal interviews with the author in May , September , October , and November . Citations will in- dicate the interview date. . Quotes from ensemble members Lanny Harrison, Pablo Vela, Paul Langland, Ching Gon- zalez, and Theo Bleckman are from personal interviews in the spring and summer of , unless otherwise referenced. .According to Deborah Jowitt, in , Audrey Monk would sing in her daughter’s “theatre cantata,” Juice, and reintroduced herself to a startled New York audience by walking grandly across the stage in one of Meredith’s smaller-scale theatre pieces, stopping to enunciate in a clear but inscrutable voice, “I’m Meredith’s mother.” The crowd adored it (). . Halprin explored improvisation, not just as a means of expression, but as a way to uncover all conceivable movements, gestures, and combinations of anatomical relationships, with the intention of bypassing habit and preference. She encouraged each dancer to explore his or her own subjectivity, and investigated unusual choreographic ideas, often working outdoors. . Monk was ambivalent about Happenings: They were always very strong as far as the images were concerned: materials, textures, visual textures [;...] they were evolving from plastic art. So it was difficult for them to understand that time needed to be sculpted. So I took some of that information and tried to integrate it into my work, which was more structured in the sense of time, as I was from a performing background. () .Kenneth King is called a “dancing philosopher,”and his works can be read in his book, Writ- ing in Motion (). He describes dance as “writing in space,” referencing Aristotle, Ed- mund Husserl, Friedrich Neitzsche, Suzanne Langer, Simone de Beauvoir, and Marshall McLuhan. . This film was made years after Monk’s original performance of 16 Millimeter Earrings. The film—produced, directed, and photographed by Robert Whithers—documents the various components of the performance, though certain elements have been reinterpreted by the filmmaker. . These composers were innovators in electronic and computer music in the early ’s. Work- ing in a new medium, they established a new aesthetic. Tenney was a pioneer in developing programs for computer sound-generation and composition in the early s. Corner was a member of Fluxus and is considered a minimalist and an elementalist as a composer. Gold- stein is a violinist who worked with open improvisation. Paik was at the forefront of a new generation of artists creating aesthetic discourse with television and the moving image, go- ing on to create elaborate video and audio environments and installations all over the world. . In Lanny Harrison’s essay, “Working with Meredith,” she personally and articulately de- scribes her early work with Monk. Monk is further described as a performer in Current Bi- ography: “She has a low center of gravity and her movement originates from her trunk, limbs being subordinated and following along. Her body moves in one piece which gives it added strength” (:). . It is important to note that while Siegel’s description of Soho in New York City may have been relevant (for some people) at that time, the area has changed radically, becoming one of the most fashionable and trendy districts in the city. . Monk and Chong were together for many years as a couple, and collaborated as early as , when he was in her company at that time. . Chong formed his own company, The Fiji Theatre in . He later changed the name to Ping Chong and Company. . The Fayum was a flourishing metropolitan community in ancient Egypt where realistic por- traits were made of the dead, usually of wood or linen, and placed on their mummies. . Dance to Monk: Choreographers Celebrate the Music of Meredith Monk () included selections from Dolmen Music, Do YouBe, mercy, and Volcano Songs. . Last Song was first performed in February with the Bang on a Can All Stars.
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1054204053971054 by guest on 24 September 2021 Meredith Monk References Baker, Rob “Living Spaces: Twenty Years of Theatre with Meredith Monk.” Theatre Crafts, March:–. Cohn, Stuart “Monk’s Story.” Soho Weekly News, May:–. Duncan, Kathy “Meredith Monk/The House.” Dance News, January. Forte, Jeannie Kay “Women in Performance Art: Feminism and Postmodernism.” PhD Disserta- tion, University of Washington. Grotowski, Jerzy Towards a Poor Theatre. New York:Simon & Schuster. Harrison, Lanny “Working with Meredith.” Clippings file, Lincoln Center Library of the Per- forming Arts. The House Foundation for the Arts Program notes for Tour 8: Castle. The House Archival Records, New York City. Johnson, Lawrence “Monk’s orchestral debut a mix of old with New World.” Sun Sentinel,
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Roose-Evans, James Experimental Theatre:From Stanislavsky to Brook. London: Routledge. Russo, Francine “The Artist as a Young Dog.” Village Voice, June:. Sandow, Gregory “The Struggle for Form.” Village Voice, October:. Scherr, Apollinaire “Keeping Two Talents in Balance.” New York Times, July, sec. :. Shapiro, Laura “Games that Meredith Plays.” Newsweek, October:. Siegel, Marcia B. “Meredith Monk’s Vessel.” Boston Herald Traveler, November:. “The Storm is in the Eye.” Soho Weekly News, April:. “Evolutionary Dreams: Meredith Monk,” Dance Works, IV:–. Stodolsky, Ellen “Education of the Girlchild.” New York Metropolitan Review, May:. Strickland, Edward American Composers:Dialogues on Contemporary Music. Bloomington:University of Indiana Press. Swed, Mark “In ‘mercy,’ Looking for Truths in Human Nature.” Los Angeles Times, Febru- ary:–. Tellberg, L.K. “Meredith Monk: Renaissance Woman.” Music Journal, September/October: –. Wallach, Amei “Avant-garde Explorer.” New York Newsday, May:–. Westphal, Matthew “Meredith Monk Goes Symphonic.” Andante, April.
Nancy Putnam Smithner, performer and director, is a faculty member in the Program in Educational Theatre at New York University,where she specializes in Physical Theatre,Act- ing, Directing, Arts Integration, and the development of original performance works com- bining text, movement, and music. Over the past twenty years, she has taught at many different venues such as Playwrights Horizons, Circle in the Square, Movement Research, the New York Dance Intensive, the Berkshire Theatre Festival, and Soongsil University in Seoul, Korea.
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