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Meredith Monk and Ann Hamilton: mercy

For more than four decades, composer, singer, director/choreographer, and filmmaker Meredith Monk has pushed the boundaries of performance in search of extraordinary possibilities. Not content to work in a single discipline, Monk has tirelessly sought many roles instead of one. The result is a body of work that is not only beautiful and vital, but which in its melding of forms has forged new directions in contemporary theater and music. As Monk's work is interdisciplinary, it is often hard to describe. Running through all her work, though, is a palpable desire to take audiences beyond the limits of language and culture to a universal realm of human experience. Monk has often referred to her works as "opera" and the latest in this line of works is mercy, a collaboration with award-winning installation artist Ann Hamilton. The piece premiered at the American Dance Festival in Durham, North Carolina, in July 2001. The domestic tour culminated at the end of 2002 with performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's 20^th Next Wave Festival, and an Asian tour is in the works for 2003.

Monk studied music, dance and theater at Sarah Lawrence College in the early 1960s. After graduating in 1964, she moved to Manhattan, where she performed with Judson Dance Theater. She soon began creating her own works, elaborate events that combined elements of film, video, dance, music, and theater. In 1968, Monk founded The House, the company of performers (who have changed throughout the years) with which she continues to explore nontraditional theater and site-specific work. What followed were pieces, or events, such as 1969's Juice: A Cantata in Three Installments, in which 85 performers in red tramped the Guggenheim Museum's corkscrew walkway, and 1971's Vessel, in which Monk bused people from her TriBeCa loft to the Wooster Street Performing Garage and then to a vacant lot.

Over the past two decades, Monk has concentrated mostly on music, developing her explorations in extended vocal technique and interdisciplinary performance. In 1978 she founded Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble, an internationally celebrated group with which she has recorded and performed some of her most evocative compositions. Monk's body of work has earned her two Guggenheim Fellowships, three Obie Awards, and the MacArthur "Genius" award. Her music was featured in Jean Luc-Godard's La Nouvelle Vague and the Coen Brothers' film The Big Lebowski. An album of the music from mercy was released on ECM New Series October 29, 2002.

In typical Monk style, music and theater have begun to merge powerfully. In 1991 came ATLASs: An Opera in Three Acts, commissioned by the Houston Grand Opera, and in 1999 she premiered Magic Frequencies, a "science-fiction opera" that the Los Angeles Times dubbed "a wonder opera."

mercy, Monk's latest operatic venture, may bear a surface resemblance to these earlier works, but its inspiration is singular and original. Monk, Hamilton, and her six-member company move slowly across a stage while a large screen, ever-present throughout the 80-minute piece, reflects projected images of faces, ears, eyes, and, eerily, vocal cords. At other times, shadows alternate with the bodies, and a flowing line is repeatedly drawn across a page, as if in pursuit of a fleeting thought. The piece's contemplative and searching tone is achieved mostly through Monk's wordless vocal music, which alternates between chanting and humming. The spare choreography doesn't call attention to itself, but establishes a lyrical connection with the images and sounds.

mercy eschews straightforward narrative, but dramatic tableaux suggest general themes. Fear of the unknown is explored when a doctor stands over a poker-faced Monk, as if delivering unwanted news. The transitory, ephemeral quality of life is vividly expressed as bubbles suspended from the ceiling undulate into wispy shapes when performers breathe on them. And the idea of community is expressed when actors emerge from the audience and then return to it later.

"There's everything in there," Monk told The New York Times about mercy. "Pain, joy, perseverance, continuation." The title of the piece is powerfully evoked in the final scene, in which the screen is filled with anxiety-producing words--father, ogre, fear, cannibal, among many others--words that in and of themselves carry the weight of history and make us hope, beg, and plead for mercy.

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Performance > Performance Art / Theater / Spoken Word | History | New York | 2000