At 80, Meredith Monk Is Still Seeking Ways to Communicate
Meredith Monk stepped out onto a circular stage, her stride paced yet fluid. She wore an all-white costume that seemed to belong to neither time nor place, and her signature braids, flowing from a neat part at the top of her head, bounced lightly over her shoulders. She didn’t sing at first, but when she did, she let out a clear, clean soprano sound.
This is Meredith Monk at 80 — performing in the staged premiere of her latest work, “Indra’s Net,” at the Holland Festival in Amsterdam on Friday and Saturday — though it could describe her at pretty much any moment in her career, whose trajectory resembles a constellation more than a straightforward path.
An interdisciplinary artist who doesn’t dabble in composition, performance, filmmaking and choreography so much as create from a Gesamtkunstwerk state of mind, in which each medium is dependent on the other, Monk is both a holdout of New York’s “downtown” past and a sui generis American master. “I work between the cracks,” she has said, “where the voice starts dancing, where the body starts singing, where theater becomes cinema.” Operating outside fashion and, it seems, commercial pressures, more than five decades into her career she remains — praise be — entirely herself.
The first staged performances of “Indra’s Net,” an evening-length work about interconnectedness and interdependence, were delayed by the pandemic. But they came at an opportune time, soon after the release of a 13-disc set of Monk’s recordings on the ECM label, a collection invaluable for its 300-page book of essays, interviews, liner notes and photographs alone. And this fall, the retrospective exhibition “Meredith Monk: Calling” will open at the Haus der Kunst in Munich.
Source: The New York Times
