“Meredith Monk. Calling” an exhibition featuring multi-sensory installations drawn from the artist’s ground-breaking oeuvre of innovative music, performance, dance, film, and video opens October 21 at Oude Kerk, Amsterdam with a second component opening November 11 at Haus der Kunst, Munich. I was asked to contribute a short personal essay for the catalogue.
I moved to New York in 1973. A workshop in Meredith 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.
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 eighteen 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 thirty 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 latest sonorous hymn, Indra’s Net, premiered at the Holland Festival in June 2023, Meredith 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.
Through the years, we shared many public conversations in Minneapolis, Ann Arbor, Burlington, and New York discussing the backstories of her resplendent achievements. In the fifty years I have known Meredith Monk, I continue to find respite and hope in her intrepid explorations. I am grateful.