From the 1960s to today, Meredith Monk has experimented with everything in the field of performing arts. Musician, singer, director and choreographer, the artist has confirmed a non-canonical composition style, in which the separation between genres is overcome in view of a total, complex and metaphorical theatricality. As a child she studied eurhythmy and musical theory, starting to compose music around the age of sixteen. After graduating from Sarah Lawrence College in New York in 1964, she began to participate in happenings and Off-Broadway shows. We are in the years of the Judsonine era, of which Monk is a part, even if she develops in another line the analytical and geometric investigations of movement typical of that period. However, the particular creative attitude, aimed at the search for a new way of conceiving dance and theatrical action, can be assimilated to that context. It should also be said that the everyday object, introduced into the performance, is used in a symbolic and metaphorical sense. On the other hand, the visual and sound context of the shows often originates from “memory”, the chosen source in which to recover the sense of the original gesture. The dancer expresses himself through a dramaturgy of the body in which the text practically disappears while the voice, understood as an archetypal movement, is used as pure sound. If Monk’s first compositions are still limited to dance (think of “Timestop” or “Break” from 1964), already with the solo “16 Millimeter Earrings” from 1966 the future “expressive” dimension of the artist’s theatricality is more clearly announced. From 1967 onwards, the creation of complex works to be presented in particular spaces begins, suffice it to mention “Juice”, a “theatrical cantata” from 1969 conceived for three different situations: the Guggenheim Museum, the Minor Latham Playhouse at Barnard College, Monk’s loft. Meanwhile, in 1968, “The House” was founded, Meredith’s Company dedicated to an interdisciplinary approach to performance. Increasingly interested in broad-spectrum experimentation, in 1973 Monk created “Education of a Girlchild”, an autobiographical journey of memory, the final version of which, performed by a large cast, belongs to the artist’s so-called “epic” works. The shows gradually acquired an extremely significant ritual dimension, defining themselves in an increasingly complete multimedia theatricality: think of the subsequent “Quarry” of 1976, one of Monk’s best theatrical works and music. In these years, the activities multiplied: concerts, operatic creations, such as the aforementioned “Quarry”, production of records and films. In 1978 the Meredith Monk and Vocal Ensemble was founded. Among the artist’s most famous works are “Recent Ruins” (’79), “Specimen Days: a Civil War Opera” (’81) “Turtle Dreams” (’83) “The Games” (’83), the film “Book of Days” (’88), “Atlas: an Opera in Three Parts” (’91). In Rovereto, Monk presents “Facing North”, a duet born in ’90 in collaboration with Robert Een, composer, performer, singer and cellist. Explorers of timeless landscapes, the two characters act in a snowy and unreal space. The gestures are minimal and simple: they put on and take off gloves and hats, they face each other with harmonicas in their mouths, they sing. “Facing North” refers to the essential and intimate dimension of a life now dispersed.
