Meredith Monk, Intrepid Aesthetic Explorer

      In other cultures, Meredith Monk would be called shaman, seer, healer; here we struggle to define her interdisciplinary prowess. Singer/composer, dancer/choreographer, actor/performer, director/playwright, visual artist/filmmaker—even together, these categories cannot capture her resplendent achievements.

Photo by Dona Ann McAdams

      She creates visceral excavations of abstracted gesture, sound and tableau, inviting audiences to experience archetypal, transformative rituals. Distilling idiosyncratic movement, three-octave vocalizing and luminous stage design to their unadorned essence, she collages these elements into transcultural dreamscapes.

      From large-scale, multivenue events with a hundred-plus performers, to intimate pieces for solo voice and wine glass, as well as award-winning recordings and films, we journey through her clear-sightedness into a vision of redemption. At the age of 82 she continues creating sui generis work.

      I have enjoyed her work for more than 50 years. I moved to New York in 1973 to study ballet; a workshop in Monk’s loft forever changed my aesthetic worldview.

      The following year, I was utterly captivated watching Paris in a church gymnasium. This intimate duet with Ping Chong amplified the quotidian of their lives into a mythic travelogue with a bit of gender bending with her wearing a mustache.  

      In 1976, the large-scale Quarry premiered at La MaMa. Mining her Eastern European Jewish roots, she created a multiphonic nightmare of Holocaust horror. Her performance as a sick child plaintively calling out remains seared into my brain.

      I marveled at her masterwork films, Ellis Island (1981) and Book of Days (1988), particularly her creation of simultaneous time through the juxtaposition of black-and-white footage with occasional color images.

      These works are timeless. The closing image in Ellis Island is a photograph of Manhattan seen from the island with the World Trade Center towers in the background. Book of Days, a medieval morality play about antisemitism and a longing for spiritual redemption in the time of plague, can also be read as an AIDS lament.

      While I was a curator at the Walker Art Center, we were a co-commissioner of her opulent ATLAS (1991), a spiritual quest through fantastical cultures, climates and landscapes featuring a cast of 18 and a chamber orchestra. Another triumph with more fully realized production values and orchestration for the operatic stage.

      Afterward, she told me she wanted to go back into the studio alone to recharge and challenge herself anew—resulting in Volcano Songs (1994), a Buster Keaton-esque solo rumination on aging. This process is emblematic for her, beginning again, letting the material determine its structure.

      Another Walker project was the initial planning for the exhibition Art Performs Life: Merce Cunningham/Meredith Monk/Bill T. Jones (1998). Monk’s bountiful gallery included performance photos, slides, posters, programs, scores, storyboards, drawings, sets, props and costumes as well as sound and film excerpts. A whimsical timeline featured 30 years of shoes worn by Monk and her performers. 

      In 2010, our professional lives intermingled again as a co-commissioner of Weave, her composition for two voices, chamber orchestra and chorus performed by the St. Louis Symphony and the Los Angeles Master Chorale. Initially chorus members were confused, saying they were used to singing words. She reminded them in the gentlest manner that they sang notes.

      In program notes for her sonorous hymn, Indra’s Net, presented last year at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, Monk wrote that early conceptualization of the new work began when composing Weave in 2010. Now Indra’s Net has come into sumptuous being. Lush arrangements, amazing performers and luminous stage design celebrate the interdependence of all living things—a necessary prayer for our world.

      We shared many public conversations through the years in Minneapolis, Ann Arbor, Burlington and New York discussing the backstories of her extraordinary achievements. In the decades I have known Meredith Monk, I continue to find respite and hope in her intrepid explorations. I am grateful.

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John R. Killacky is the author of “because art: commentary, critique, & conversation.”