Meredith Monk: Performer-Creator

Extract

It is as the creator and director of her own highly innovative works that Meredith Monk is perhaps best known. Since graduating in 1964 from Sarah Lawrence College, she has channeled her energies into deVising performance pieces that fuse, in varying balances, a “triangle” of dance, theatre, and music into a single unified whole. Monk has described her works in such terms as “a live movie,” “a theatre cantata,” an “opera epic.” She is interested in the way that the forms of dance, music, and theatre work against and with each other “and then the form that comes out of these crossings. That's why I have different names for different pieces. Because I'm always surprised at what the balance comes out to be myself. And then after it's finished, I sort of have to figure out what it is.”