11/09/2025
How Do You Hear a Dancer Dance?
By Deborah Jowitt for The New York Times
September 12, 1971
MERED1TH MONK, important experimenter in dance, cuts a record. That fact alone is interesting—demonstrating as it does the trend against specialization that has been going on in some vanguard circles of art. Choreographer Mame Cunningham conducts a John Cage score; in turn, during a Cunningham dance Cage reads stories that he has written; artist Robert Morris presents dances at the Whitney museum.
Monk's own latest works are not dances, but huge and complex structures of events designed to attack different areas of the audience's eye, ear and, 1 daresay, brain. She creates events—some of them disturbingly beautiful—that tug at some prelogical mythic consciousness in the spectator. A king in a golden crown, his face invisible, droops over a stone in a smoking mist. Four people, dressed in red and painted red, march in a sleepy line; they wear big red climbing boots and cling to each other. Girls in diaphanous dresses ornament a tree. A boat conveys a pale couple over a lake toward the audience. Some of these images are explored or developed. Others stud her pieces like a collection of little keys; the doors they open may not appear, may not exist any more. The events happen in awesome spaces: the Guggenheim Museum, the lake and the Great Lawn at Connecticut College, the vastness of an entire building.
For some time now, Meredith Monk has been composing the sounds that are part of her dances. It is these sounds, and some others, that Increase Records, a Los Angeles company, has recorded. The disk is called “Key” and is billed as “invisible theatre,” which is, I think, a good clue to what it does and how one listens to it. does not profoundly engage or hold the attention as a musical structure; rather, it provides a suggestive textured backdrop for daydreams. Musical logic per se doesn't shape or guide the various sections; instead, the performer‐composer's trance‐like pursuit of the feeling tones of what she is doing creates a kind of dramatic or psychological shape.
Most of the performing is done by Monk herself. Hers is the “traveling voice” that roves over, that creates, a geography of dream landscapes. What she can make that voice do is fascinating: nasal wails, ululations, moans, quavers, monkey‐laughs, She squeezes the sounds up her throat, plays with them, palpates them with tongue and lips. Once she opens up to deliver a distant soprano and ripples it over organ arpeggios—suggesting the ambiance of a seedy funeral parlor. Monk, in the more dance‐like parts of her theater pieces, often moves as if she were searching out and trying to emphasize those movements of transition—usually passed over—when one movement actually becomes another. It is the same with her vocal technique; often her voice teases back and forth between two notes as if she wanted to find the narrowest place between them, as if she thought that perhaps she could sing them both at once.
Her voice displays one predominant texture for each section and works in and out of various drone backgrounds —a repeated 6/8 motif on the electric organ, for example, or a reiterated percussive beat. Voice, jews harp, eleetric organ, and mrdingam (played by Collin Walcott) are the only instruments, and these are occasionally overdubbed to produce the desired effect. Because Monk works with simple materials and sets them in monotonous or hypnotic patterns, her music has a primitive sound and easily suggests some kind of Indian ritual.
There are other sound events in “Key,” but very brief ones. Twice a man with a heavy blurred voice rambles on about a dark soft room with black walls, a purple velvet sofa, a thick carpet; the red roses from the wallpaper fall slowly onto the floor engulfing him in color and scent. In another kind of trip, some voices—or one metamorphosing voice—chatter dose to hysteria along different tracks. (Lanny Harrison and Mark Monstermaker are both credited as “vision voices.”) Feet approach and leave the microphone, The untreated atmosphere of the various lofts and studios where the recording was done remains to make the voices echo or the air crackle with breathing and static.
Recently, Meredith Monk as a performer has been merging more into the total fabric of her theater pieces. She plays an important part, but in no sense features herself; her concepts have become too large for that. With “Key,” the effect is very much the voice of Meredith Monk, and the other brief episodes act as signposts for its Journey.
Monk possesses an extremely interesting voice; between 1967 and 1970, she had written effective music—mostly in connection with her dances. Why not cut a record? However, convinced as I am that Meredith Monk is a formidable talent in many areas, I think that had she set out from scratch to create recorded “invisible theater,” she would have come up with something far richer and more complex than “Key.” Perhaps this is only the beginning.
One fine passage near the start of the record, had for me an interesting side‐effect: It made my cats bite each other.
Catch CinemaNiche presents Monk in Pieces this Saturday at Studio Two Three!
Tickets available here: www.cinemaniche.com
