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The Art of Meredith Monk Sally Banes A fanciful program note from 1969 states: MEREDITH MONK was born in lima Peru/grew up in the West riding horses/is Inca Jewish/lived in a red house A COMMERCIAL: SHE WILL PRESENT A NEW WORK: "TOUR: DEDICATED TO DINOSAURS" ON MARCH 4 IN THE ROTUNDA OFTHE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION IN WASHINGTON, D.C. Started dancing lessons at the age of three because she could not skip/did Hippy Love Dance at Varney's Roaring 20's Topless Club in California/has brown hair.' As an autobiographical statement, it is the real Monk, even though some of its details may not be accurate-if one goes by rational, external verities. But in its stream-of-consciousness mixture of the most mundane details with unabashedly romantic figments, it's revealing of the texture of her work and life. Monk was born in Peru, where her mother, a singer, was on tour. But she grew up in Connecticut, the descendant of European Jews-including a cantor, her grandfather, who founded the Harlem School of Music. Monk 3 learned to sing before she could talk, read music before she knew how to read words. At three she began to dance, first studying eurhythmics (a system of teaching musical rhythm through body movement, invented by Emile Jaques Dalcroze) and then ballet. As achild she also studied music theory and harmony; at 16, she began composing. Monk's first dance performances were with a New York group doing Israeli folk dances.2 In college at Sarah Lawrence, Monk majored in performing arts, studying with Judith Dunn and Bessie Sch6nberg among others. In 1964 she moved to Manhattan where, besides choreographing and dancing her own works, she performed in Happenings, off-Broadway plays, and other dance works. Monk's own work since 1964 can be divided roughly into five categories so far: early dance works; large works for specific sites; chamber works; collaborations ; music recitals. She has also made several films and recordings. By the time Monk arrived in New York City, the dance world had seen the first stage of a creative rebellion and the choreographic revolutionaries of the first Judson generation were consolidating their discoveries and advances. Monk's work, in a sense, reacted against the aesthetic of that revolution, while taking advantage of an ambiance that fostered formal experiments. Her program did not involve rinsing dance of spectacle and theatricality-as had, for instance, Yvonne Rainer's-but rather, exploring the very theatricality of expressive performance. Break (1964) used the wings and back entrances of the theatre to mask parts of the soloist's body; at one point, Monk left the stage to view from the audience the vacuum thus created. Movements in The Beach (1965) were tailored for an imaginary personathe beach lady. Like the Judson pioneers, though, Monk was less concerned with the attention to technical virtuosity that was strangling modern dance, and more concerned with generating new movements, if need be, to make new statements. Using strategems like chance composition, improvisation, games and tasks enacted during the performance, and repetition and fragmentation, Rainer and others sought to isolate movements for their own sake, to be examined and valued as objects in themselves. Rigorously defying illusion, these choreographers often presented openly the process ofarrangement. The aim was to call attention to the beauty of ordinary, simple movements and (somewhat) ordinary bodies. Monk, on the other hand, wrenched quotidian movements and objects from the context of the everyday world, transmuting rather than presenting ordinary things by presenting them in new frameworks, forming within the theatre a separate world with its own logic and customs. Though she also used repetition and fragmentation, her meanings emerged-more in the tradition of some Happenings and even Graham's expressive dances-not through chance, rarely through improvisation , but through the careful, poetic arrangement of visual and aural imagery , juxtapositions of surfaces, sounds, gestures and spaces. "The artist's hand isn't something I want to eliminate because that's like giving in to the machine," Monk has stated. And "John Cage would say there's enough structure and I would say there's enough chance."' In Break a typical...

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