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1 Meredith Monk Meredith Monk is one of the pioneers of the site-specific performance genre. From her earliest experiences in New York, Monk began pushing the boundaries of postmodern dance and music. In her efforts to use nontraditional performing spaces such as museums, loft spaces, and parking lots by the late 1960s, she set the stage for other choreographers and directors to seek out alternative performing spaces. Monk has had a career that spans four decades, and she is recognized as a visionary artist in the disciplines of music, dance, film, and theater. She has received the MacArthur “Genius” Award, two Guggenheim fellowships, a Brandeis Creative Arts Award, three Obies, two Villager Awards, and two Bessie awards for Sustained Creative Achievement, among others. Kloetzel and Monk spoke in Monk’s New York City loft on October 14, 2006. An Interview with Meredith Monk MK: What gave you the first inkling to go outside the theater space? MM: I performed in galleries a lot when I first came to New York and always had an interest in space. In the summer of 1966, I was teaching workshops and I was already getting kind of tired of the frontal orientation of the theater space. So in each workshop I took people to different places in New York, and we explored those spaces. I remember one was Wall Street, one was the Staten Island Ferry, one was a park near the river. Then,duringthesummerof1967,Istartedthinkingaboutworkingwith a building itself and going beyond the proscenium stage situation. I was up at an artists colony called Group 212 in Woodstock, New York, and I decided to use the outside and the inside of a building as the environment for my piece Blueprint. I brought the audience outside, and I had them sit on little benches, quite close to the building, so they were really looking up at the building. There were different activities going on in each of six windows. Some of these activities had to do with sound and music, and some with visuals—shadows, Meredith Monk 34 films, red light, etc. There were many different simultaneous layers of activity in that building. There was a certain point where the cast formed a procession that eventually went through the door into the building. The very last image in the piece was of someone up on the roof throwing down 20 pounds of flour from huge bags. MK: It seems like your process has been heavily influenced by the concept of layering. MM: Yes, layering is often in my work. I like to explore the layers of texture and skin and surface. I often think more like a visual artist, a painter or a sculptor. I take this sense into the performance experience where I have a dialogue with the three-dimensional space. For example, I did a version of Blueprint in the gallery space at Judson Church in the fall of 1967. The whole piece had an additive structure with each image or tableau building on the previous one. But because the basis was stillness, each action was discrete, altering the visual and aural situation enormously. For this version, we only let 25 people into the space. The audience entered in total darkness, and then at a certain point the lights came on; the first image consisted of Alfred North and me sitting in chairs for about 10 minutes. I had painted the room white. The lights were also white. We were dressed in black clothing and were wearing black blindfolds. After our stillness we began performing very simple activities. Then a third performer, a woman dressed in white, took off our blindfolds and began pouring rocks on the floor from a white pitcher. At the end, the audience heard a piece of music that I wrote with Don Preston, Candy Bullets and Moon, from large speakers in the room. The audience then heard the sound of someone knocking on a door, which came from a portable tape recorder that I had hung on my shoulder. Alfred and I got up and started walking toward the door. We opened the door, and it looked like we were going outside, but it was actually a closet. The woman in white went to the window and opened up the black curtains. She invited the audience to look out the window. I had made life-sized dolls of me and Alfred sitting on two chairs with their backs to the audience, so when the audience looked, they...

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