MEREDITH MONK: IMPERMANENCE
Presented by the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of the 2006 Next Wave Festival at the BAM Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton St., Brooklyn
November 1-5, 2006
By ELLEN PEARLMAN
Meredith Monk's Impermanence. Photo by Michael Cooper, Courtesy Ellen Jacobs Associates
“Liminal” is the word Meredith Monk called out during Impermanence, an evening length work expressing the massive grief she experienced when her long time partner Mieke van Hoek died. With a series of short, stripped down and shorn vignettes, sparse video and photographs, bare lighting, poignant words, monochromatic garb, signature musical style and a stage suffused by a subtle mist, she used this arsenal of artistic mediums to tackle the enormously profound philosophical and psychological issues of loss, memory, permanence and perception. Though there was no grand climax, there were moments along the way that ripped the thin veil that accompanies everyday reality to tackle weighty themes such as; what are we composed of and how do we perceive what is in front of us; if everything lasts for the briefest of moments, is anything real?
Impermanence at first glance seemed like an amalgam of techniques, a sensorial overload conveying an ineffable idea. But like the morning after pill, the next day fragments of Monk’s haunting imagery came back to me again and again, boring into my head like a worm hole. Employing more video and photographic imagery than she has before, 24 Hours of Faces, Part 2, showed close ups of faces gazing at the camera often filled with tears. Sitting solemn and alone at the piano Monk tenderly played Last Song, listing a litany of heartbreaking finalities; last exist, last rite, last time, all poignant reminders of temps perdu.
Her ensemble of Theo Bleckmann, Katie Geissinger, Ching Gonzalez Allison Sniffin and Ellen Fisher, accompanied by musicians Bohdan Hilash and John Hollenbeck used their quirky bodies in Particular Dance to walk, fall, run, gesticulate, sit, play pianos and drums, yelp, squawk, sing and even in a light hearted moment, laugh. The choreography displayed their ordinariness, yet it is through basic movements and ordinariness we identify most closely a loved one. Hollenbeck played the strings of a bicycle tire projected onto a screen like a shadow puppet á la Marcel Duchamp. Shapes of the Invisible was a vortex provoking video zooming out of the minute cellular structures of plants, hair, wood and metal, going from unrecognizable cellular structure to the simple everyday familiar object built by such microscopic architecture.
The most radical imagery was when the Computer Vision Lab at Columbia University worked with Monk to produce World in an Eye. Using a split screen, on the first screen a viewer’s eyeball moved as it was looking at a bus. On the second screen, the actual bus was shown passing by. This was akin to having a camera in someone’s brain so you could tune into what they were seeing while you saw the reflection of what they were seeing in their own eyeball. Such imagery begged the question are we real, or just reflections of ourselves like a moon in a barrel of rainwater?
