How unexpected – exuberant, despairing, loud, soft, uncomfortable, peaceful, and again, how unexpected. This American icon Meredith Monk in my small Adirondack town.
This forgotten hero took the stage last night. Is she forgotten? I’m not really sure. None of my three 20-something year old kids had ever heard of her. Yet for the crowd gathered at the Mill, a cool new art space — they had remembered this evocative artist’s vocalizing, breathwork, clicking, mouth harp, and pure whimsy.
But I had forgotten my own roots — my own the New York theater scene in the 1980s — attending shows at P.S. 122 and hanging out with my bestie at the time Ann Carlson. I was suddenly 20-something years old again myself.
Others may remember Monk from even earlier, from the 1970s, as a carefree and ‘genius’ artist who used her voice and her movements to reflect on the world — be it natural, unnatural, or supernatural.
At 82, Monk still rocks the world. She is now the subject of a new documentary, “Meredith in Pieces.”
Still. She uses her performance as an invitation — to the audience — along with her fellow musician John Hollenback, to find life, meaning in ordinary and extraordinary sounds.
Her performance pieces included: “Wa-lie-oh,” from 1975-76 and “Click song” from 1988 and “Simple Sorrow” from 2020. This last one, particularly touching, as she noted our alone-ness during the pandemic. She wrote it for her teacher Pema Chodron, who wrote “Welcoming the Unwelcome,” with a message, that bears repeating, and Monk did, quietly, “Don’t give up.”
Monk also introduced us to her most recent work, “May the Dark Ignorance of Sentient Beings Be Dispelled,” from 2022. Throughout the piece and the performance, she delivered an underlying message that all humans depend upon one another. At the celleluar level, we are interconnected. We were asked to see “the cell as a fundamental unit of life.”
I heard these spoken words, melodies, pantings, insect noises, gutteral sounds, and pristine arias. I found myself wondering, ‘How does she do that?’ At one point, it seemed my hearing aids and I became a singing bowl, full of reverb, unable to scale the heights of the sounds we were taking in.
The cherry on the top of her performance? The encore, a piece called “Cat.” Ellen Fisher, a long-time dance collaborator, joined Monk and Hollenback by prowling, graceful, feline through the audience onto and off the stage.
Walking out of the Mill after last night’s show, I was greeted with the twangs of amplified country music from the County Fair right across the street from the Mill on Route 9.
The lights of the carnival rides in front of me and the dizzying experience of the ride behind me — that unexpected ride into the world of Meredith Monk, I felt joyous, unmoored, and ecstatic. It was a magical night.
100 Days of Poems and Pics 