Vessel (1971), Monk’s “opera-epic” about Joan of Arc, opened with an overture in Monk’s new loft below West Broadway, traveled to the Performing Garage on Wooster Street in SoHo, then to an empty parking lot transformed into an ancient battlefield and campsite across the street from an old Dominican church, standing in as the site of Joan’s ultimate immolation and martyrdom, represented by thick sparks. Later that year, Tour: Dedicated to Dinosaurs was performed in the Dinosaur and Whale Rooms of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., and Tour 2: Barbershop in a museum in Chicago. Seventy-five white-clad “angels” chanted and hummed as they spiraled up the museum ramp, exploring the resonant acoustics of Frank Lloyd Wright’s six-stories-high domed space. The first installment of Juice: A Musical Cantata in Three Installments (1969) was performed in the interior of the Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue.
#THEATRE PICS SERIES#
Performing in Downtown New York while still at Sarah Lawrence College, Monk plunged into the Happening and Off-Off-Broadway scenes, creating a series of site-specific music-theatre works for unusual environments, augmenting her utopian company, known as “The House,” with additional performers for each event. Her vocalizations were pre-verbal: nonsense syllables, repeated consonants and vowels, whining shrieks, microtonal yelps, monkey chatters-a medley of soul sounds capable of surprising expressivity, purity, and range, with a fully developed contralto vibrato shining behind her weirdest howls and folk-inflected syllables, lodging in the mind as ineffable states of being. Her theatrical vision was rooted in the voice. “Meredith Monk was born in Lima Peru” ran the playbill bio at the ill-starred Billy Rose Theatre Broadway event in 1968, continuing: “grew up in the West riding horses/is Inca Jewish/lived in a red house…/started dancing lessons at the age of three because she could not skip/did Hippie love dance at Barney’s Roaring 20s in California/has brown hair.” Equal parts countercultural fantasist, wild child, and visionary saint, Monk at age 25 was an American original. It was an era of formal precision, ritual enchantment, therapeutic play, and public participation, reflecting powerful communal urges in a world that seemed to many to be on the verge of some cataclysmic upheaval. The surge of theatricality in the postwar avant-garde had opened tremendous reservoirs of collective feeling across the performing arts of Lower Manhattan, climaxing in the visionary theatre collectives of SoHo, the capstone of one of the great eras in 20th-century American theatre history. “The Theatre of Images”-a term coined in the early 1970s by Michel Guy, director of the Avignon Festival in France, and popularized by Bonnie Marranca in Performing Arts Journal-was, along with performance art, the major development in the live arts of the ’70s. This article is adapted from Survivors of a Future That Never Happened: A Cultural Review, 1974-1994 (Montreal Publishing), available on and. Montreal Publishing, November 2022, 322 pp, $20.41 paper.
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