Writing About Drawing
- Writing About Drawing
I draw to clarify my concepts and to get an overview of the piece that I am working on. I make different kinds of drawings for different pieces — maps, charts, line drawings, watercolors. It is a way to organize my thinking and to find the spatial configuration, atmosphere, color scheme, or the vocabulary of the world that I am exploring.
I began the map drawings in the late 1960s when I was making large-scale, architectural site-specific works. I had always drawn overhead floor plans for my pieces, but now the maps became essential both as a kind of score for me to work from as well as a handout for the audience to show them the time structure and where to move during the performance. I was very interested in the audience-performer relationship: scale and proximity, different time structures, and changes within one performance. For example, sometimes the performers were still, like sculptures, and the audience moved around viewing them at close range; sometimes there would be simultaneous events in different rooms during a precise duration and the audience could move from room to room during that time; sometimes the audience was in one area and the performers were seen and heard from a great distance. Each performance became an expedition guided by the map drawing that the audience received.
American Archeology #1 was created to be performed on Roosevelt Island, in New York City’s East River, which had always been designated as a site for outcasts and criminals, outsiders of society. Part I was performed in the afternoon at the north end of the island where there is a park and lighthouse. After a dinner break, Part II was performed on the south end of the island at the site of the former Renwick Smallpox Hospital. American Archeology #1 emphasized the relationship between past and present and the accumulation of layers of culture in one place. The two map drawings delineate the location of the different events as well as the underlying concepts of the piece. [End Page 82]
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A page from Meredith Monk’s American Archeology notebook. Courtesy the artist.
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Meredith Monk, original drawings for American Archeology #1: Roosevelt Island (1994). Courtesy the artist.
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Meredith Monk is a composer, singer, director/choreographer, filmmaker, and creator of new opera and music-theatre works. Over the last five decades, she has been acclaimed by audiences and critics as a major creative force in the performing arts, and as a pioneer in what is now called “extended vocal technique” and “interdisciplinary performance.” Her work has been presented at major venues throughout the world. In 2014–2015, her fiftieth season of performing in New York, she will hold the Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall all year, a residency that will include several performances of her work, both by Monk herself and with other artists.
