Meredith Monk: a verb, not a noun - dancers recital spans disciplines - Cover Story

Dance Magazine, April, 1998 by Gia Kourlas

Meredith Monk in her April 17 Town Hall vocal recital continues to span desciplines in her approach to both art and life.

Onstage, Meredith Monk uses her voice and body as a means of transforming herself into ethereal beings. But on this particular cloudy Monday morning, the extraordinary multimedia artist is anything but ethereal. Sitting inside Tribeca's Franklin Station Cafe--her self-dubbed "home away from home"--Monk looks ingenuous as she flips through an album of vacation photographs that a waitress has brought to show her. One shot causes her to catch her breath. It shows the waitress wearing a black mandarin shirt similar to the red one Monk has on herself. "Where did you get that?" Monk asks, pointing to the shirt in the photo. Visibly relieved at the answer-Pearl River, the glorious Chinese department store in New York City-Monk nods approvingly and practically sings, "Good old Pearl River-keeping us all in clothes," and bursts into laughter.

At fifty-four, she has carved out a unique, brilliant style of wordless singing that treats the voice as a dancing voice and movement as a singing body. Her voice has all the character, texture, sensuality, and color of her movement. In the nonlinear 1994 Volcano Songs, for instance, she explores issues of death, aging, mortality, and transformation through images of death and rebirth. At one point she convincingly takes on the voice and figure of an old man. Along with pioneering what is known as extended vocal technique" and the interdisciplinary, or mixed-media, performance, she also branched out into filmmaking and created Ellis Island (1981) and Book of Days (1988), among other works. Her accumulated honors include a Mac Arthur Fellowship and a 1992 Dance Magazine Award.

Art for the has the power of internal restoration. Starting with Atlas: an opera in three parts in 1991 and continuing with recent works like The Politics of Quiet and a Celebration Service, both form 1996, Monk has stressed the spiritual nature in her works. She vividly recalls the epiphany she experienced during the sixties while seated at the piano in the Tribeca loft where she still lives: "One day I had a revelation that the voice could be like the body. It could be like a hand, it could be flexible, you could develop a vocabulary built on your own voice the same way you could with movement for your body."

Lately, the word sacred is often used when she speaks of her artistic intentions. "How do you create sacred space in the world that we're living in now without trying to force something on people that they don't necessarily want?" she asks. The Politics of Quiet, an oratorio for ten singers and dancers, two instrumentalists, and two children, was initially inspired by the writings of Willa Cather. While Politics dealt with spirituality in a theatrical sense, Celebration was much more direct. Monk composed the nonsectarian piece in honor of the one-hundredth anniversary of the American Guild of Organists. It has been performed twice, originally at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City, and later at Charleston's Spoleto Festival in 1997.

The simplest piece that Monk has created thus far, Celebration featured twelve vocalist-dancers, two instrumentalists, and two performers who read sacred Zen Buddhist, Hasidic, Osage Indian, Chinese, Ethiopian, and Christian texts. Pieces from earlier repertory are included, such as selections from Atlas, "Offering" from Volcano Songs, "Celebration Dance" from The Politics of Quiet, and the gorgeous "Processional" from American Archeology #1: Roosevelt Island (1994).

Monk says that she's been thinking for the past few years about how to break down the barriers between audience and performer without putting any pressure on the former. "The main idea of the piece," Monk explains, "was a sense of acknowledging the fact that no matter what tradition you come from, we all come from the same place. I think that when you make art anyway, you're trying to create sacred space."

A sacred--or perhaps spiritual--quality has been a constant of her work. "I've always been kind of nervous about talking about this," she says, "because it is, in a certain way, something that you can't talk about. But now I've realized that you have to dig in your heels and do it. It's not a goody-goody, tweet-tweet, angel spirituality at all, because in the life that we lead, everything is part of it--the obstacles, the disappointments, the dark side. Our society is based on instant gratification; no one wants any trouble, It's very much about escaping what makes you uncomfortable. I'm much more intrigued by dark and light as part of the same circle."

Since 1985 Monk has been involved in the seated form of worship known as Shambhala that is practiced by Tibetan Buddhists. This ritual, she realizes, has had a distinct impact on why she's intrigued with depicting a certain type of spirituality onstage: "It's a quest of trying to offer another kind of experience for people who are bombarded and who live in a world that has a lot of speed. In a sense, it's thinking of time as timelessness rather than being a mirror of the particular society that we live in. I realized that when you offer a mirror, people go home and don't have anything to work with because, in a sense, we all know what the problem is. What would happen if you showed a different kind of behavior, or if you offered a place for people to relax that part of their minds, to come out feeling a sense of revitalization and awakeness? I think, in both voice and movement, that you really can experience a depth of emotional experience. That you might want to demand more in your life."