REVIEW

Commemorating the Musical Half of Meredith Monk
By Anna Kisselgoff
Published November 22, 2004

To call Meredith Monk an avant-garde choreographer and composer is a wild understatement. Anyone who has accompanied her on her creative journey since she graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1964 and plunged into a poetic brand of multimedia spectacle can testify to her rule-breaking originality.

Six younger choreographers, all leading experimentalists, paid tribute to her as part of Ms. Monk's 40th-anniversary season in "Dance to Monk: Choreographers Celebrate the Music of Meredith Monk," a program presented Friday through yesterday at St. Mark's Church. Molissa Fenley, Sean Curran, Doug Varone, Dana Reitz and Bill T. Jones created new works; Ann Carlson presented a New York premiere.

There was a time when Ms. Monk's wordless vocalizing and idiosyncratic instrumental music were considered an acquired taste. Today, the world has caught up with her. Jean-Luc Godard uses her music in his recent film, "Notre Musique," as do Olympic synchronized swimmers. Ms. Monk's first symphony, commissioned by Michael Tilson Thomas, received its premiere with the New World Symphony Orchestra last year.

Sitting on the floor of her loft in 1969, Ms. Monk told me, "I'm also a composer." The "also" was not irrelevant. Ms. Monk was then making her name with spectacular site-specific pieces, and these clearly came out of a choreographic sensibility.

Who can forget the rows of performers looming over interior spirals in the Guggenheim Museum? Or her trek down a red carpet inside the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine and, later, the motorcycles that raced around the waterside behind the World Financial Center? Or the intimate image of a sick child in bed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music?

Ms. Monk composed her own music for these pieces but also wrote independent scores. The choreographers on Friday night drew from both kinds of compositions.

Ms. Monk did not perform but acknowledged a roaring ovation. She will appear at a benefit tomorrow night at St. Mark's.

This first program, conceived by Laurie Uprichard, executive director of the Danspace Project at St. Mark's, led off with a hilarious video clip of a synchronized swimming duo from Canada competing at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. The collage score came from Ms. Monk's "Dolmen Music" and "Book of Days".

Fanny Letourneau and Claire Carver-Dias were the swimmers whose purple lipstick matched the humor of their mainly bottoms-up precise performance.

Ms. Fenley, Ashley Brunning and Cassie Mey performed "Piece for Meredith," which Ms. Fenley set to excerpts from "Mercy" ("Line 3 and Prisoner" and "Woman at the Door"). Ms. Fenley's trademark purity of movement and hyper-extended arms ran through this plotless trio, whose members parted and reunited in changing patterns. Curving torsos and straight arms were the norm as voices echoed one another on a recording. Kathy Kaufmann, the lighting designer for the evening, did excellent work here.

Mr. Curran's dance vocabulary was more conventional than Ms. Fenley's but served him perfectly for a strong dramatic solo set to "St. Petersburg Waltz" from "Volcano Songs." Ms. Monk's score was inspired in part by her Russian grandfather, while Mr. Curran, who has often created abstract versions of Irish dances, seemed at first like a stage Irishman in his derby. But this was rather an Irish fiddler on the roof imbued with human insight. With his black beard and cascade of Eastern European folk dance gestures, incorporated into rapid circling patterns, Mr. Curran moved brilliantly into an emotional character portrait of shifting moods.

Mr. Varone's "Desert Tango," to the same composition from "Atlas," a Monk opera, was a fraught-with-tension duet performed with commitment by Nina Watt and Nancy Bannon. The combative emotions and rejections veered toward soap opera but were strongly expressed.

Ms. Reitz was perfect in "With Meredith in Mind," one of her formal solos that rely more on cumulative hand gestures and shifts of weight than steps. Like Nijinsky in "Afternoon of a Faun," she jumped only once. The vocal score was "Unison" from "Our Lady of Late."

Ms. Carlson created "Flesh" for the Axis Dance Company from California, which integrates disabled and nondisabled dancers. Judith Smith and Bonnie Lewkowicz were the performers in motor-driven wheelchairs who pursued each other in rhythmically paced trajectories. They were also part of human pyramids created by nondisabled dancers who positioned themselves on the wheelchairs. Stephanie Bastos, Katie Faulkner, Sean McMahon, Renee Waters and Alisa Rasera were those dancers in a piece that had surprisingly strong emotional undercurrents. "I still have my mind," Ms. Monk sang out in music that came from "Turtle Dreams," "Dolmen Music" and "Do You Be."

Mr. Jones used the title song from "Do You Be" for a wry close in a video by Janet Wong. He, too, wore a derby and was often seen in a sinking plié. A superimposed image of his nude body, seen from the rear, provided some humor in an affectionate tribute that ended with Mr. Jones's hand on his heart. The shot this time was frontal and nude but from the waist up.

Published: 11 - 22 - 2004 , Late Edition - Final , Section E , Column 3 , Page 3