Volcano Songs
By Justin Hayford
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Monk seems to draw sustenance from taking risks, from redefining herself. Starting out with New York’s interdisciplinary Judson Church crowd in the 1960s, she progressed through site-specific performance installations in the following three decades to her three-and-a-half-hour opera Atlas, commissioned by the Houston Grand Opera a few years ago. You never know what’s going to come out of her next. But no matter how avant-garde, her work welcomes the listener-viewer with its unexpected familiarity. Her gestures are simple, her images archetypal, her melodies hummable. Unlike her male contemporaries Robert Wilson, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich, with whom she is often indiscriminately lumped, Monk does not thrust her genius upon us from Olympian heights, crushing us with its endlessly praised brilliance. Rather it bubbles up from within and carries us gently along. Her work is eminently approachable. It seems we could all be Meredith Monk if we dedicated ourselves to our inner visions.
But Monk isn’t playing characters or even embodying personas; what she does is too subtle for that. Rather she’s modulating energy and point of view. The kind of nuance that’s given her wordless vocalizing such emotional variability through the years in recordings finds its physical equivalent here in a slightly slumped posture, a tiny tilt of the head, a minute droop in the hand. Something is different in each new section, yet it isn’t large enough to accomplish a full shift in character. The performer changes even as she remains the same.
