Conversations with Meredith Monk (Performance Ideas) - Tapa blanda

Meredith Monk’s work as composer, performer, director, choreographer, and filmmaker has been a singular achievement in creating the new vocabularies of contemporary performance and interdisciplinary arts. In 1978, she formed Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble, featured on numerous recordings and in worldwide performances. In addition to her vocal pieces, music-theatre works and operas, Monk has created new repertoire for orchestra, chamber ensembles, and solo instruments, with commissions from Michael Tilson Thomas/San Francisco Symphony and New World Symphony, Kronos Quartet, Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra and Los Angeles Master Chorale, among others. She performed a Vocal Offering for the Dalai Lama at the World Festival of Sacred Music in Los Angeles in 1999. Her music can also be heard in films by such directors as Jean-Luc Godard and the Coen Brothers, and in the recent HBO series,True Detective. In March 2012, she premiered Realm Variations for six voices and small ensemble, commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony, and performed in John Cage’sSong Books as part of the Symphony’s American Mavericks Festival. Monk has made more than a dozen recordings, most of which are on the ECM New Series label, including the 2008 Grammy-nominatedimpermanence.

Among her many operas and music-theatre works are mercy and Songs of Ascension (both with the artist Ann Hamilton),Atlas, The Politics of Quiet, Quarry, Education of the Girlchild,16 Millimeter Earrings, and Vessel, a pioneering site-specific creation. Monk’s films and videos includeBook of Days, Ellis Island, and Our Lady of Late. Her visual art works and installations have been exhibited at the Walker Art Center, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, the Whitney Biennial, and the Frederieke Taylor Gallery in New York City.

Monk has received numerous honors, including the MacArthur Genius” Award, several Obies and Bessies, and induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her newest music-theater piece,On Behalf of Nature, premiered in January 2013 at UCLA and will be performed as part of the 2014 Brooklyn Academy Next Wave Festival, a season when she will celebrate her fiftieth year as an artist. Meredith Monk has been appointed the 2014-2015 Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall.

Bonnie Marranca is founding publisher and editor of the Obie Award-winning PAJ Publications and PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. A recent recipient of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education Excellence in Editing Award for Sustained Achievement, she has written or edited seventeen books. She is the author of Performance Histories,Ecologies of Theatre, and Theatrewritings, which received the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. Her writings have been translated into twenty languages. Marranca has also edited several play anthologies and essay collections, includingNew Europe: plays from the continent, Interculturalism and Performance,Plays for the End of the Century, and The Theatre of Images. Other general interest volumes areAmerican Garden Writing, Hudson Valley Reader, and A Slice of Life: Contemporary Writers on Food. A recipient of Guggenheim, Fulbright, and Leverhulme Trust awards, she has taught and lectured in many universities in the U.S. and abroad. She is Professor of Theatre at Eugene Lang College/The New School for Liberal Arts.