Interview: Meredith Monk, performance artist

I was wondering about the impact of being an artist like Monk, someone who has, since her career began more than four decades ago, never followed any tradition but has forged her own unique artistic form and performance style. Surely that takes a special kind of self-belief? Practically speaking, surely it was sometimes difficult to find an audience?

"In a sense I was lucky coming to New York when I did (in the 1960s] because I found a community of artists that was a built-in audience for experimentation," she says. "Over the years that audience has stayed with me. I've never had an empty house. Ever."

Monk, 67, has created music, dance, opera, installations and films. She's a composer, singer, dancer and director. She's won major awards (a MacArthur 'genius' award, two Guggenheim fellowships), she's been nominated for a Grammy and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006. Along the way, she's earned a devoted following. Thinking back, she says, on the whole, it was always that way.

"In the cultural centres - New York, Minneapolis, California, Washington DC - there were definitely people who were moved or changed by seeing the work, even in the early days. But I do remember being in the Midwest and people were playing shuffle board and saying 'is this singing or crowing?'"

Monk says she is a "fourth-generation singer". Her great-grandfather was a canto of a Moscow synagogue, her grandfather was a bass baritone who also played the violin and her grandmother was a concert pianist. Monk's mother, a radio jingles singer in the 1940s, was quick to understand that her daughter was musically minded. Monk sang before she could talk, she could read music before she could read words. Music and movement were her languages. To an extent they still are.

She began creating music while she was still at college in New York in the 1960s. The way she describes it is that one day she had a "revelation" that the human voice could be like an instrument, that it didn't have to use words. From there she developed what is now described as "extended vocal technique", a way of using the voice which Monk has pioneered. It's singing, but without words, and often combined with movement.

Perhaps the most well-known description of her voice is that it sounds like "a folk singer combined with a baby bird".

"If you look from now to the past, my work is basically like a tree with two main branches: one is exploration of the human voice and that's a very deep centre of my work, it's the heart of my work; and the other branch is focused on these multiple perceptual weavings, combining visuals with movement, or installation work which is visually oriented but with a sound element. It's been a continuity right from the beginning - that longing to weave together perceptions, to affirm the richness of us as human beings both as performers and audience members."

Mixing genres and forms, challenging traditions and established artistic approaches came to the fore in the 60s, as Monk began her career, but for her mixing disciplines, breaking them and reshaping them has always come from both aesthetic and social concerns, and in recent years, has been further influenced by her Buddhism.

"Early on I realised that the implications of weaving together different perceptions was a kind of antidote to the fragmented world, or the notion of the Western European tradition that there is this separation and specialisation: a singer is a singer, a dancer is a dancer."

Monk looked to other cultures and traditions for different forms of performance where various elements were combined to form part of a larger whole. And then she found her own way.

"In the late 60s I was making these huge site-specific pieces where I'd take five or six of my people (her ensemble members] and then we picked up 50 to 100 performers in each place and I'd make a work in these gigantic spaces," she says.

"In the late 70s I was asked to sing for the first time in Germany. I'll never forget it. It was at a festival in Bremen. The German audience went berserk and the reviews were a phenomenon. For some reason the German audience understood how technically challenging this music was; it wasn't just someone yelling their head off. They understood the tech aspect but they also understood the poetic aspect of it too. It was a big breakthrough."

By the 1980s Monk was recording as well as touring with her ensemble all over Europe "like a rock and roll band". Playing in concert halls and in clubs, Monk further established her reputation as a major artistic figure.

"Really since then it's just progressed," she says, "along the path as they say in Buddhism. Somehow I've stumbled along my path."

Monk is honest about how challenging the process of creating her work is. "It's painful every time and very scary," she says. "That never ends.

Sometimes I think, 'My god I've been working for 45 years, could I ever just have a time where I'm not shaking with fear?'" And yet the work continues.

Songs Of Ascension, the piece Monk will perform as part of the Edinburgh International Festival, was inspired by a poet, Paul Celan, who wrote of the songs that were sung as people climbed the mountain outside Jerusalem. Monk's work combines her music, performed by members of her ensemble, the Elysian Quartet and the Edinburgh University Singers accompanied by a video installation created by artist Ann Hamilton.

Although Monk had been thinking about the piece for a number of years, it was chance which created the opportunity for her to work with Hamilton, when in 2007, she was asked to sing at the opening of the tower that Hamilton had been working on for 18 years. Monk sang a cappella with four members of her ensemble to get a feel for the acoustics in the building. It worked. Both Monk and Hamilton are site-specific artists but they agreed to think about how to reconfigure the work to be performed in a conventional theatre. Video was the answer. Or more precisely multiple, simultaneous, rotating projections.

"It's not something that's supposed to call attention to itself," says Monk, "but both of us want the audience to have a sense of immersion in the process of the piece."

The idea that an audience is somehow swept up and lost in the moment appeals to Monk because she wants her audience to feel a "direct experience", something to connect them to the moment.

"One of the things we (Buddhist practitioners] are always talking about is impermanence and hanging out in the unknown," explains Monk. "To be an artist is about as good as that gets other than being a nun as far as working with uncertainty because that's what we do all the time. That's what I hope I can provide for an audience if they'll let themselves have it."

Part celebration, part ritual, Songs Of Ascension is made for that kind of response. It comes from Monk's belief that art should surprise us and move us, that in some way, at some level, change us.

"When I'm an audience member I do not want to go and see something that I already know, I want to see something that I don't know. I want to be surprised and stimulated to think about something. I want the magic. I want to be in a situation of uncertainty, that's what excites me.

"But our society is saying the opposite - you make your programme of what you like on your iPod then you give it to Apple and then they think they know who you are and your tastes and then they've got you. You're owned by them.

"I want to do the opposite. I want to provide no manipulation whatsoever.

Some people can't go into that state, but if you can let go of the narration of your life to have a direct experience for even an hour as we as performers do, being vulnerable and in the moment, to share that? I really can't think of anything better." v

Songs Of Ascension is at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Sunday 29 August and Monday 30 August as part of the Edinburgh International Festival. Meredith Monk will be in conversation at The Hub on 26 August

This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday, 22 August, 2010

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