Meredith Monk

by Deborah Jowitt

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Summary

"I work in between the cracks, where the voice starts dancing, where the body starts singing, where theater becomes cinema."―Meredith Monk Meredith Monk has startled and enthralled audiences since the early 1960s. Her visionary work as composer, playwright, choreographer, filmmaker, singer, and dancer has helped to define the American avant garde and earned numerous honors and awards―including the culminating honor of a MacArthur fellowship in 1995. In Meredith Monk , Deborah Jowitt brings us an absorbing portrait of an artist whose career spans three decades of American avant-garde performance. Collecting writings by Monk herself, along with significant reviews, essays, interviews, and photographs of Monk's unique performance events, the book establishes her as one of the great treasures of contemporary American culture. With other radical artists of the 1960s, Monk pioneered the use of multi-media in performance, and she continues to experiment with new technologies and materials to create powerful images in her work. Inspired by cultures where performance is considered a spiritual discipline with healing and transformative power, she has sought to re-establish the unity that underlies music, theater, and dance. Collected here for the first time, Monk's various writings and the record of her remarkable performances show her to be an artist with a far-ranging and consistent vision. Whether presenting epics like Quarry (1975) and her more recent Atlas (1991), small music theater pieces like The Plateau Series (1978) and Facing North (1990), or solo vocal recitals, Monk remains firmly situated in the bardic tradition. Her forms may be wholly contemporary, but her images, her voices, and her themes resonate with the power of myth and legend. "Monk's vision is about wholeness and continuity, in art and in life... She makes us aware of the submerged connections between islands of difference."―from the Introduction

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