Monk baffles with unclostered art

By Siobhan Peiffer

Observers always commented on Martha Graham's eyes. Even in photographs, you can't help noticing their allure: half-distant, half-inviting, completely self-assured. In stills from her solo performances, it seems her look did half the dancing for her. Meredith Monk has the same soulful-yet-confident gaze. And appropriately, for perhaps of all the contemporary female performers dancing in Graham's long legacy--Trisha Brown, whose season at Brooklyn Academy of Music was touted as a highlight of 1996 or Molissa Fenley, now performing at the Joyce--Monk most fulfills her spirit of complete innovation.

Not that she's a strict dancer/choreographer in the modern tradition; part of Monk's iconoclasm means wearing multiple creative hats. Besides dancing and choreographing, she is a versatile composer, and sings many of her own compositions; she has directed and produced films and albums of her work. In these medium crossings, she calls herself an "archaeologist," paring down movement and music to the most basic human instruments: voice and body.

Monk's pedigree is as "traditional" as modern performers get. She comes from a family of singers, graduated from Sarah Lawrence in 1964 with a degree in dance, and founded two of her own companies: The House, for interdisciplinary performance, and Meredith Monk and Vocal Ensemble for her vocal compositions. She has performed or staged works at all of the major performance art spaces: White Oak, BAM, Serious Fun, and Jacob's Pillow. She has been awarded the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, two Guggenheim fellowships, a Brandeis Creative Arts Award, the Dance Magazine Award,1986 National Music Theater Award, 16 ASCAP Awards for Musical Composition, and three Obies, including one for Sustained Achievement.

Yet the traditional art world has never known how to classify Monk, a performance artist who was inventing words when other choreographers were trying to think up steps. The resulting operas, "Vessel" from 1971 and "Atlas," composed 20 years later, combine long, low organ tones with the squeals, moans, scales, slides, and vocal sing-song that such a standard source as the Grove Dictionary of Music described "as if she might be singing ethnic music from a culture she invented herself." That's not too far off, as both works chart culture clash: "Atlas" is the story of a girl explorer, and "Vessel" sets Joan of Arc's life in 20th century New York city.

Part of Monk's "archaeology" is memorializing, containing contrasting times and places within a single composition, even a single dancing and singing figure. Monk's fascination with the past and history is evident in projects of all mediums: she links a medieval plague with the AIDS epidemic in "Book of Days," an attack of fever with the rise of totalitarianism in "Quarry," the music of Hildegard von Bingen with her own in "Monk and the Abbess." Her site-specific piece "American Archaeology No. 1: Roosevelt Island" had dancers skipping and jogging through New York City parks, then playing patients in the actual ruins of a smallpox hospital.

Though she's more than once been termed avant-garde--a description Monk hates--it's tough to reconcile her deep spirituality, her reverence for history, even her archaic equipment (she uses a four-track tape recorder to dub polyphonic music) with her status as a cutting-age multimedia artist. Now 52, Monk has less and less patience with the progressive art world in general, and her work seems bound to confound it. Her dances are notoriously tough to catalog; old-fashioned oral communication is the only record of some of her choreography. Even her latest composition, "The Politics of Quiet," is a meditation on time that rejects modernity's bustle.

Yet Monk's down-to-the-roots philosophy somehow keeps the paradoxes from splitting apart. While everyone knows that the past is part of the present, that spirituality can be modern, that physicality is the base of art, the platitudes are easier to take when we watch them being made real. Monk's style makes unity of the medium as well as the message: for her, "voice and body form parts of a single expressive instrument."

In her performance Friday night at the Yale Dramat, Monk is going solo to revisit some favorite music and dance selections.A highlight will be "Songs from the Hill", a exploration of her voice as an instrument. The piece's structure changes with location and whim: for Meredith Monk, each new time and space is a distinct invention.

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