 Welcome everybody to the Martini Siegel Theatre Center here at the Graduate Center CUNY and thank you for watching our propaganda video. My name is Frank Henschka and I'm the director of the center and we do bridge academia and professional theater international and American theater here at the Graduate Center CUNY at this theater laboratory living archive. However one might call it to be very close to the PhD program in theater. So it's a great honor for us to have one of the great American masters of contemporary art with us, Meredith Monk. Thank you. And so it's a true honor, you know you have been here before, we showed you films, you also came to one of our site specific conferences and other events. And then with us is Bonnie Maranka, the great PHA editor from the performance, journal of performance and art and Bonnie as not all of you might know actually is accredited of the program here at the Graduate Center CUNY. So it's a fantastic evening for us. Thank you all for coming on kind of a really snowy cold New York day. And I know how much you all have on your plate and what you do for really coming out here tonight. It means a lot for us and it's really important. And we do need good theater, we do need good performances, but we need also good audiences, informed audience. So it's a really it's an honor for us that you came but also of course to have one of the grandmasters of the game here with us here. So thank you very much. If you have a cell phone, please do take it out and make sure it says off. I'll do the same sound off. Yes. Thank you. And we will have a little reception after our talk here. So it will be structured. We'll have a conversation a little bit with me, but mostly with Bonnie and Meredith, of course, and then a Q&A. But sometime though, you also can ask some question. We have such a great audience, such a knowledgeable audience. So this is really a moment to really interact. We have a little reception, very short one here afterwards. And then there's another screening in the evening. So we can't stay for too long. But again, thank you for coming. And maybe we'll open up the first question. So you might have to take your microphone though. Not only that everybody can hear you better. We also are livestreaming it and recording it. It was the great hall round organization, which does it nationally. So we now have over 500 videos and evenings online. It's a great archive used by scholars all around the world. And we have truly thousands of clicks. So it's an important medium that it is beyond just the room that all of you hear about truly an engagement with the art and academia and with thinking. And thinking by doing that's what you do. But Meredith, you're one of the great, great composers and singers. We've showed your films today. Why do you make films? Well, I've made films pretty much from the beginning of my work. And I always thought of film as a place that can be beyond time and space. So as a live performer, I always wanted to make another dimension in the live performance. I also think of editing film like making music. In some ways, I feel like making film is like making music, like visual music. So it's been an element, like a layer that I've used throughout my years of working. How did it start? What was the very first engagement? The very first film that I made was in a piece that was a really breakthrough piece for me in 1966 before most of you were born, called 16 millimeter airings. Which we showed in the afternoon. But the whole piece was really, in a way, it was a culmination of many years of thinking about how could you make a form that included these different perceptual modes within one poetic form. So, and each mode had its own integrity. But at the same time, by putting them together, it made more resonance. So in that piece, I was working with a voice. That was the first time that I actually did like a whole score of vocal music. Gesture, and there was some text, but I used that in a very abstract kind of way. And then mostly visual images. And I was thinking a lot of the whole space as a kind of canvas. And that was the first piece that I used film in. And I used film projected in different ways on that canvas. So it was not like just a screen in the back of the space. And people were working a lot with film as a backdrop. And, you know, it was projected, then it was projected over people. And not really thinking about weaving it as something to make another layer in a piece. So I projected it in different ways. And I was working a lot with scale then. So for example, one image was a gigantic dome over my head. And my face was projected on that. And so it was very large. It was like I had a large head on a small body. So I was thinking about also things that you can't do live. Like you can't do a close-up portrait in that scale in live performance, except to put it onto a film or some kind of medium like that. So I was just playing with a visual sense of what live performance could be. Before we then come also to Bonnie, what are your very, very first things you remember ever seeing on film and who influenced you afterwards? Are you talking to me? I'm talking to you, yeah. What do you remember as what is the very first imprint? The Wizard of Oz, because I lived in Queens, on Queens Boulevard, and across four lanes was a tri-lon movie theater. And I actually thought that people lived there that were in the movies. So I thought the witch was going to come across the street and get me. That's my biggest memory of film, my first memory. So I thought that all the characters lived in the movie theater. So that's a very strong memory. But I think a person when I first came to New York that I loved very much, and for good reason, because I think in a sense she's part of a lineage. Thinking about the arts was Maya Daren. I remember her films when I first came to New York, and it was that displacement of time and space that was very hard to achieve on live performance. So one way that I was working with it, the first piece that I did in New York was called Break. And I was very interested in displacing techniques from one art form to another, like kind of, you could say, transposing them. So I was very interested in cinematic form, like how would you do a cut in a live performance, or how would you do a wipe, or how would you do a dissolve, or something like that. And so the piece was a solo piece, but it was these very short, sharp images and gestures and characters, or personae, that changed instantly, as if you did cut, you know, as if it was shattered glass, or as if you had these film cuts. And that was where, you know, and in a sense I was trying to do that kind of displacement of time and space with a solo figure, and what would that be. You know, I don't think I did the displacement of time and space, but it did have a certain quality, because that was what I was trying for. But then, you know, soon after that, I did see Meshes of an Afternoon, and there was always that sense that, you know, you could work in an environment and then shift to another environment. And, you know, literally, you know, that environment was also something that was very primary in film. You know, on stage, it's something else. It's the room that we're in, and it's very present. But I love that, you know, I think my film is like something like Alice Island, I think the star of the film is the place. Yeah. How to experience it. Bonnie, you are the founder of P.A.J., first of all, the name was the Journal of Performance, and you also had performance and art. What does Meredith fit in, in your view, in the, of watching over decades, the New York scene, where does she fit in, where is her work situated in film, but also performance? What a question. Well, the first time I saw Meredith's work was in early 70s, and when, at that time, a number of people performed in their own homes. So it was very special. It was a piece called Anthology, and Small Scroll, Anthology and Small Scroll, and I think I wrote about it for the Soho Weekly News. I was a student here at the time, and I was also writing for the Soho Weekly News, and Trisha Brown also had performances at home, and I guess Joan Jonas did, and well, there were quite a lot then, so that was actually very special. That was my first introduction, but, and I think it continues to today as well, things were quite compartmentalized and separate then, so that I considered Meredith at the time not knowing her work so well, and just arriving in New York the year or two before, more in the dance field as I grew as a performance historian and researcher and editor, I came to have a much larger view of her work in so many different fields. So when you talk about her work, one has to talk about the beginnings of performance arts before the term came about in the 70s, non-narrative and abstract cinema of the time in the 60s, also Intermedia, which Dick Higgins began to theorize in 1965, and then music theater, the development of music theater, but also she uses photography and drawing. I remember a piece of long ago, recent ruins that I was so intrigued by drawing in the film itself, and you can see that in Ellis Island, the use of drawing, or you can see the use of photography. So in a way, it's a kind of consummate, it's a history of avant-garde performance, and I consider that Meredith has really contributed to what we understand as performance culture in New York. Thank you, thank you so, so very much. So when you were both working in New York, you were writing, was there like an exchange, or was there kind of a dialogue between the two, did you influence each other, is that a way, so how did that work at the time? What did artists react to? Well, I didn't really know Bonnie at that time. We met each other many years later, but I remember you meeting really, having fun with you more in the 90s, because I remember Gautam and Bonnie coming to Politics of Quiet, which was already 1996. I mean, I was always loved PHA, and I had so much respect for Bonnie as a writer and thinker, because we don't have so many people left that really have that depth of thought about what performance really is about, because I think it's about, it even is more, it goes deeper than even perception. But I mean, I think that, I remember Julian Beck one time introduced me in a benefit that I did with him, and he said, this is Meredith Monk, and the subject of her art is perception. And I was like, wow, and then I realized, in some ways it is. But I think of perception as only the door to spiritual discipline or transformation. So it's really perception as a kind of steps to the, it would be like what Aldous Huxley said, threshold. Meredith, remember that I was thinking about this during the films. In the 70s, people use the word perception a lot and consciousness and energy. Those terms seem to have, correct me if I'm wrong, but those terms seem not to be so strong and vocabulary now in terms of criticism because of the way that theory and criticism have moved. But almost all the documents and the way that people describe their work is very much about more in the phenomenological sense of perception, and that's why you see so much about the face and the hands and gesture because also people, I think we all need to remember that the avant-garde was so new in the sense in the post-war period, separating from data on futurism, surrealism, and the European avant-garde and modernism. So people were just beginning to create new vocabularies. And I think what you were doing was part of that creating of a kind of an American aesthetic and totally new vocabularies after the war. And I, well I always have a really hard time with the words avant-garde anyway, because I'm not sure avant of what it is, because I think for me, I feel like I'm trying to find new ways of doing things, trying to each piece I do start from zero in a sense and with no assumptions or expectations and try to find something new even though I have the backpack of my history on my back. So we are who we are for our lifetimes, but who we are is fluid. So I like to continue discovering as I go along and risk. So the thing is for me, the word avant-garde makes me think more of the 30s, 20s and 30s, early 20th century and then that European avant-garde. So at the same time of wanting to find something new and discovery being the source of what I do and what keeps me going in my life, I think that I think of circling back to the most ancient of times. I think of time more as a cycle or a circle of uncovering fundamental human energies that we all have and that we've lost. So there's that sense of trying to affirm life and say now in a very dark time, but going back to very, very basic fundamental human energies. So I know it's a historical term, but I have a hard time with it. I think that that's another really intriguing aspect of the works, looking at the films, the anachronisms and the sense of time in space. Maybe you could address that in a sense, your view of history, your view of actually of time that goes back and forth in time and that encompasses all time. But basically your view of history, I'm interested in that. I was also gonna say something about this idea of perception also is that in some ways I feel like, this is gonna sound really crazy, but I feel like I'm an artist, but I also feel that I'm sort of a philosopher. I feel that my work also has to do with the underpinnings of art or of a piece as much as it does the piece itself. So that's thinking about, always thinking and rethinking about what art is in relation to life and the world that we live in. But in terms of time, I think that I'm very aware, I think of time as cyclical mostly. And for example, a piece like Quarry and it's coming back up again, I was very interested in these kinds of, what would I say, the aesthetics of fascism and how those aesthetics recur over and over again. We're seeing it now again. And so again, it's a perceptual thing, but it also has to do with how history continues to repeat itself. With Book of Days, I was thinking about AIDS at that time, so that was in the 80s, but the plague in the Middle Ages is that same human behavior of scapegoating or making people be the other. So it's more how these human things recur and how history recurs, and yet at the same time it will always be new. The clothing of it will be new, but the underpinnings, we have similarities to people in the ages. Does that answer it or not? And then also within, that's the historical time, then within a piece, I think that I always like to use time as a sculptural element that I can compress or I can extend and stretch and shape time within a piece. And part of my job of making a piece is to also determine what is the time world of that piece. Speaking of time, then time in the theater and time in film, we experienced it so differently in a way. You already spoke a little bit about scale and the idea of the face that you can do more with that in film, but I want to go back to something you also said earlier that might tie the two together. The whole question of the image. You said you think of your films as music. How does the image work in theater as opposed to or in relation to the difference that the way you conceive of the image in film with regard to being a composer? In other words, the musicality of the image that you speak of. Actually, I think the older I get, the less difference I see. I think I work with live performance pretty much now in the same way. Again, the language of film has a certain kind of fluidity that is hard to achieve on stage because stage is clunkier just by nature. Like one of the big decisions when I make a piece is are people gonna come in and out or are they just gonna be there? So are there gonna be entrants as an exits or will they just be there? That's a big decision. Whereas film, that's not even a decision. You basically can cut or dissolve or you can go from one place to another fairly quickly. But I do, more and more I just feel as I've gotten older all these elements just start to coalesce more and more because I was thinking about cello songs. I made an installation as a kind of adjunct to the piece. The piece is very abstract and there are two large films within it but I was really working on the cell as the basic unit of life. And it's five women cast, very carefully decided to have five women in this patriarchal world that we're living in right now. So my beloved male performers in my ensemble I just say, well, you can't be in this piece but the next one, I love working with them too but it just seemed very, very important. And something I knew that I had not gotten into the piece was in a sense our DNA and that ancestral, the sense of the ancestral lineage of each of us. And so I did an installation where I had each of the five performers and shot very, very close. So you just saw their faces like the screen was their faces, lined up and we were singing one of the pieces from cello songs which is a kind of hockey piece. The hockey is where a person just has one note. So it would be, whoo, whoo, whoo, whoo. You'd see it like go from face to face what note they were singing. Then there'd be shots of just their mouths singing it and so you would just see that mouth singing it. And then there was a section where we did find all these old family photographs and you saw each line of each person like where they came from. And then there was a section where we used MRIs or X-rays of the insides of our bodies and very interested in that medical kind of aspect too. So that was, I would say that that was a, it was, I don't even know whether you could separate music and film in that because we were singing the whole time and then there was another round that we did. So music and the film was so integrated that you couldn't pull them apart. So that's why I'm feeling more and more this kind of coagulation of elements. Whereas I think my earlier work, sometimes I thought of them more as parallel lines and if you look at early charts or maps when I make pieces I would line up these elements like here are all the gestural ideas, here are the, here's any text, here are the characters, here's the music and it would be these big charts. I think these are so integrated that it's almost like the whole thing, the whole piece is a kind of musical sculpture. Because you're moving more and more toward music in a way and away from bigger spectacle. Well I still love spectacle and I love scale but I think the music is so intricate. And so part of my task in the last number of years is how do I make the other elements simple enough and transparent enough that you actually hear the complexity of the music instead of the music being a kind of accompaniment. Because you know when you take music and if you put very fancy images or movement then suddenly the music recedes and then it becomes the accompaniment to what you're seeing because we are such a visual culture. So how do I even them out so that you actually through these very transparent and simple visual forms you actually hear the complexity of the music. And then my eyes, I don't actually see three dimensions, I see layers because I have strabismus so I see out of one eye at a time. And the thing that kind of excited me about cello songs was I started seeing that these forms, these musical forms were almost like they were rotating or they were sort of going like this. It's the first time really that I think I ever did this very three dimensional kind of woven form this way instead of this kind of layers where you hear one layer through another. And so that made me think, you know, realize that the music itself was like sculpture. And in a way the whole piece is very architectural and very sculptural. I think back you're going to say something. Just as a question. Sorry if I'm blathering off the subject here. Only actually we all just want to hear from you. That's why we're here. If you prepare for a film, say you're going to film a work, there's that famous story of Fritz Lang who would get up at five o'clock in the morning and make the drawings. When they came at eight o'clock, it's very day. He once was in a car with Jean de Goudard and the guy was driving around. He didn't know where to shoot the film. He had to find the right place. It was the cast in the van and that drove him crazy. Of course, but how do you do it? How do you prepare technically? You have a 16 millimeter camera. Do you have it? Do you have, should you make drawings? Well, how is that prepared as a filmmaker? Every piece is different. Every film is different because a book of days in Ellis Island, I was shooting the 35. A book of days was a different process than Ellis Island because book of days was going to be feature length films. So I'll work backwards for book of days. I worked with my dear collaborator, Yoshio Yabara, who is my costume person, but we're really like two peas in a pod. And so we, and he's a wonderful, very wonderful visual artist. And I mean, I love to draw myself and I had drawn some preliminary storyboards for book of days, but then we just decided to sit down and I would tell him what the scene was and then he would draw, you know, we would just do a storyboard and he'd say, does it look like this? No, does it look like this? No, does it look like this? No. And then we did a whole, we did literally a whole storyboard and which is beautiful to look at. But then when I ended up shooting in France, I mean, that was my structure and my, you could say the armature, but then I would always allow if something came up at that moment to, you know, let it play very much the way that my pieces are that they're very meticulously structured but there's always room in the pieces to play, you know, in the moment. Ellis Island I didn't do as careful a storyboard, I really was much more being in that space and then, you know, just doing very rough drawings and then in a way of, it was a more intuitive process. Yeah. And then with this new one, I also did do little drawings for the, for cellular songs. Yeah. And do you feel that if you do perform yourself, you write the music, is it a continuous movement in time and space? As one said, do you feel it's just one big piece you work on? Are they completely different? Are they connected? That's a very interesting question because I was thinking about that the other day. In the old days, I used to almost think of that, you know, one of my pieces was called Juice for a good reason that my work was like liquid and that it would, and then there'd be bottles along the way and so that liquid would go into a new bottle and if I was working on something that I hadn't really finished in my mind, that could go into the next piece. And then I went through a period now where I, as I say, I like to start from zero and really make this new reality, this new world with each piece. But to be totally honest with you, in cellular songs, there is a historical little section from a very old piece in the 70s. So I allowed myself to pull that, again, that sort of lineage forward into this piece. It's a death scene that Joe Stewart does from, it's from the plateau series from 1978. So lately, and you know, in a way, I also think about it a lot like a visual artist because if you look at Matisse and like a retrospective of his work, what's beautiful about that is you'll see that he has an idea and it doesn't really work, the first two or three canvases that, you know, you can see what the idea is but it doesn't quite, it's not quite there. So he does 10 more and then you see it evolve and develop and bloom and then he moves on to the next idea. And so in a way, sometimes I think that there are elements in my work that are like that too, where if I'm not 100% satisfied, they worked in that context but I feel there's more to discover than I allow it, if it works into the next piece, I'll allow it to flow into the next piece. So it is one body of work. And then the other part of the question that you asked me is the performing and creating the work. That is very challenging. It's very challenging because, you know, in a piece like Quarry, I gave myself a role where I just lay in the bed the whole time and I was kind of directing by ear. So every, you know, we do Quarry. I mean, Nikki was the dictator in Quarry and I would, Nikki, after the, you know, I'd be just listening to it. Maybe at the beginning of it was, it could be a little faster or something like that. I would literally be listening and then I remember like after and write down, you know, the notes that I had. So, in the last years, I've been, I've just let myself be more, much more integrated in the ensemble. And then also when I was younger, I could go out and then just jump right back in and be able to perform it. Now I've got to spend a lot of time preparing for myself to perform it because I'm, you know, not a spring chicken. So, you know, it becomes very, very challenging. I'm glad you mentioned this. We're so off film, though. Let me see if I can go back to something. I'm glad you mentioned, though, this factor about, you know, the what's saved for different things, this whole process with the liquid and the challenges of making work because sometimes, you know, people are fixated on the meaning or a statement about work and so much of it seems to be about solving problems or having spiritual needs and things like that. I was going to ask you about what other kinds of freedoms do you allow yourself now? Well, I heard this great interview with Toni Morrison and she said, I'm 80 years old. So now I'm allowed to say, no, shut up and get out. And I'm like, I'm not there yet, but boy, that would be a really nice freedom. Okay, to go back to the films. They actually seem very timely looking at, for example, the apocalypse theme in Turtle Dreams or the immigration in Ellis Island. They seem very timely and it's, how do they look to you now? You know, pretty much they hold up for me, you know, and I think that is a thing of, there are some artists that are very reflective of the world that they live in and they become a kind of mirror of the time that they live in and that's some very strong work. And then I think the other people that are more like me are trying to make a more timeless kind of art, you know, that still would apply but has another kind of resonance if you saw it 10 years later or something like that. And I think that that's why they seem to hold up for me. So your work is more about transcendence. I don't watch them lately though. More about transcendence than, you've spoken before about when you were younger trying to lay out a political statement or a political. And yet it was always oblique, you know, I never wanted to be that literal about it. And so even quarry, which is inspired by World War II and in a sense it's a kind of meditation about World War II, I think if you think, the resonance is more a meditation on war, you know, on fascism, on control, on occupation, you know, those were my concerns, you know, imprisonment. So, you know, and that could transcend World War II, you know, the literal quality of World War II. We did a piece, Specimen Days. Again was inspired by the Civil War because I was thinking a lot the first time I went to Europe about the fact that we had never had a war in our soil, you know, on our soil since the Civil War. And that we haven't been occupied yet, except by Occupy now. But so, and again with the Civil War, that was pretty specific. It was called Specimen Days and also very inspired by Walt Whitman's accounts of the Civil War. But in a way I was dealing, in that piece, the outside was the Civil War, but the inside was the mentality of dualism. The mentality of I'm me and you're the other, or you're black, I'm white, or you're red, I'm green, or you're northern, I'm southern, or you understand that mentality of, and you know, how we place people in that position and categorize them, you know, I think that's really what Specimen Days was about. And then as a question, perhaps also to young artists or people who do a work or in your footsteps, what did you learn? What do you feel over time? What could you say? This is something I wish I'd known earlier. What I know now, this is what I believe we should, it's about what we are doing. Yeah, I wish I had been kinder to myself. You know, I feel like I wish that I had been more gentle with myself. If I look back as I look at that work and I think, my gosh, I was 23 years old and I made 60 millimeter earrings, but why did I take, why did I not go, you're good? I don't know, you know, it was, you know, on one level I think the discipline and the rigor is really important for each person to have and to not be self-indulgent at all. And at the same time, you have to have the other side that's really being gentle, that's like saying, you know, just keep going, just keep going. And I think what I learned is that, and what I try to tell younger people and the children that I work with and younger people is, you know, the most important thing is that there's only one of you in the universe. And on you and only you have something to say that's only what you have to say. And I think you cannot be satisfied until you find that and, you know, don't stop short of that, but just keep going with trying to discover what that is. And it doesn't even have to be in art, it can be in anything. You know, what are you and only you? What is your expression? And what are you called to do in the world? And with love. So I feel like, you know, the base of it all is love. Is that why you seem to be? And that's all there is. Is that why you've been so happy recently to be working with children in your work? Well, I mean, they're just so great. That's why, I mean, they're so fabulous. Yeah, in a way, I guess, you know, again, synchronicity, I just did a piece for a white light festival with the Young People's Chorus of New York. They did an evening of my music and then three of us sang with them. So that was an incredible privilege. And Francisco Nunez is this extraordinary conductor. Kids are, he has thousands of kids singing from all over the New York area, from all backgrounds, from all ethnic backgrounds, from all economic backgrounds. And he really is hard on them in the best sense of the word in that he will not take anything less than the best they have to give as musicians. So they're like top of the line, you know, as musicians. And yet, he's so funny and kind and they know that he loves them to death, but he's not going to accept anything but the best from them. And they're just the most wonderful to be around and just so moving to be around. And then, I think that's kind of, it's sort of the synchronicity is that these last years, I think as you go along working so many years, what can, you know, I'm considering what do I have to leave behind and how can I pass on what I've learned in my lifetime, even though just like a parent and a child, you want your child not to suffer in the way that you have and it never works because they have to learn for themselves. But there are things that you can pass along and encourage this spirit of curiosity and spirit of adventure and devotion, which makes a very happy life. I saw for the first time the children film, the film with kids here. And of course, in your films, in Book of Days, the young girl, Visionary is there and Atlas, I'm thinking of the opera Atlas, there was a young girl and so many pieces. So, I think it just has to do with them that I feel that if all of us could find, and I don't mean, you know, your inner child like the psycho babble, but I mean the playful aspect of ourselves, the child-like aspect of ourselves, not the childish, child-like aspect of ourselves, if we all were, you know, if our society was kind of based on that, I don't think we'd be in the kind of trouble that we are in now. And so I think that the Visionary kind of aspect and a sense of kind of purity of vision that children have is what I'm trying as a metaphor and as an artist, I guess, you know, as a kind of metaphor for an artist. You mentioned- I guess. You mentioned before the word spiritual, I think, also used to that. I remember Julius Molina, who also was here and someone said, you cannot even understand her without knowing she was the daughter of a rabbi. You know, tell us about the spiritual side of your philosophy, as you say, you are a philosopher, which I think you're right. The current issue of the New Yorker, which actually goes into the philosophy of perception and reevaluates that also in the use of VR and also how to work with artificial intelligence, how to make it so that it really kind of works because it doesn't. So it's interesting, I think, current magazine, but- What would you like to know about it? I would like to know what is your philosophy of spirituality in your work as performer, singer, and filmmaker, and- Well, I'm a Buddhist practitioner from the Tibetan lineage, and that's been for a number of years. Well, I taught at Naropa Institute in 1975, and that's how I kind of got pulled into it. But I think that as a young artist, some of those values that I later learned were really very fundamental Buddhist principles, I think were just intuitively principles in my artwork. So, and I would have never gotten to it except through my artwork. You know, it's like, because I was so fanatic in those days that that would be the only way that you could knock, knock, knock, hello, art, art, okay, come in, so I mean, I'm not sure that I would have been open to it any other way. What are the principles? Because I was also very skeptical about organized religion or spiritual practice. But I think way back to when I was in college, I was a Baha'i for a while. I mean, I was a seeker. I was a searcher for, I think, as a young person anyway. But you said the principles are the same, but what are your principles? Well, for example, fluidity of time and space, silence, nowness, immediacy, freshness, that pain, pleasure and pain are pretty much one circle and neither of them are to be fought or to be pushed away. Within one piece can be tragedy or comedy within one work, not separated. Breath as a source. That's some things. And how do they show? Space, space, I think space is not necessarily literal space, but overall space, which is something that you learn as you go along that what we think of as our, some of our ideas or our attitudes or our opinions are only ideas, attitudes and opinions. And you actually learn how to see, that's only a thought because there's space around it. So it's basic space is, and also I think another, well, I've learned so much from practice, but another thing is not fearing the unknown because things are changing every moment anyway. So we have these fixed ideas of who we are, but we're changing every second. So that's reality. And most of our suffering comes from trying to push away from that. It's not to say that we don't have pain in our lives, like pain is pain and pain is painful, but the suffering from that is because we're trying to push that away as if it doesn't exist or we don't want it to exist. So I think I'm still working on it, but I learned a lot from that. And I try to get that into my work as much as I can. Yeah, once we had that definition of Buddhism, where it says it's a joyful participation in the sorrows of life. Yeah, yes, exactly, exactly. Yeah. Very close. So how does, let's say you prepare for a show, how does a day look like of Maritismans? You get up and how do you... Show day, I try not to do anything. Or rehearsals, or rehearsals. How does, if you say you practice also, how do you go through a day? Well, I try to meditate every day. In the mornings? In the mornings, but a half an hour or sometimes even 20 minutes, I feel... You have an image or music? No, it's only just breathing. It's really, really down to earth. It's very, it's not like Hoochie-Coochie, it's not like, oh, you know, it's the opposite of that. It's the opposite of what people think it is. People think it's like, oh, you're gonna be so blissed out and everything, forget about it. You're like, one, two, three, four, thinking. One, two, three, you know, it's really more just seeing it. It's more like just seeing how your mind is racing. It's more like waking up rather than blissing out. Do you know what I mean? No. Okay, so there's many, many... You started at 10 o'clock rehearsing or how... Usually we work in the afternoon or the evening, but let me just go back to the meditation thing. So there's many, many, many techniques of meditation, but the basic one is the breath. So if I was gonna use that rather than counting, I would just try to concentrate on my out breath and then I thought would go bang into my mind and then the ideal, but sometimes it doesn't happen like for the whole half an hour, would be to see that that idea hit my mind and then I just go thinking and back to my breath again. So it's not about getting caught up in the content of the thought, it's just actually seeing the thought and seeing the frequencies of thoughts that it's going blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I mean, my teacher sometimes said that she's gone a whole meditation time and it's just been blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, the whole time until the gong rings and then she finally says thinking. So it doesn't, the content that you could be thinking that you're gonna kill your mother one thought and the next thought is I want an ice cream cone and they're sort of equal, you know what I'm saying? So it's sort of more seeing how the mind operates. So on a performance day, and Kirsten knows this very well, I try not to do anything, that I don't do anything. Now some of my performers, if we were on tour or something like that, they'll go sightseeing and everything, I just cannot. I've just got to put all my energy into that performance and then I'll sometimes let myself sleep late that day. I mean, I'm very, very tender on a day of performance and I pack all my things, like to go to the theater very carefully and then I take about two and a half hour ritual before I go on stage and that's just warming up. Can you tell a bit about that ritual? It's like warming up my voice and my body and then it's making up and then sometimes I even sort of ask for what I would like to have happen. Like I would really like to be relaxed, be joyful, be generous, you know, say to myself, you know, what I would like to have happen. You spoke about breathing. Is there anything you could say about the rhythm of breath and the rhythm of the work? Well, I mean, singing is a direct extension of the breath. And I think breath is, and sometimes I use the breath as a singing part of the voice. The breath itself is part of the music. Using breath as a sound. But, do you mean in the overall structure? Well, I was thinking, for example, you often use lullaby or certain plaintive type pieces. Are there certain meters that appeal to you more? That's interesting. Well, my early training was in Daukrow's Eurythmics, which was a wonderful pedagogical method developed by Monsieur Daukhoz, who was a Swiss composer in the late 19th century. And he made a lot of music from Swiss folk music as Bartok was doing in Hungary and Kodai. And, but he was also as a teacher of music in a conservatory. And he noticed that there was one particular student of his who was having a hard time with rhythm, rhythmic articulation. But he noticed that he had a very smooth way of walking. And so he realized that if he could figure out rhythmic exercises for that young man to put into his body, that he would maybe understand music and it worked. And so he, you know, Daukhoz said, all musical truth is contained in the body. So the three pronged approach to his way of teaching was number one, rhythmic training, rhythmic studies. I remember as a tiny, you know, I started when I was three catching balls in rhythm, you know, skipping in rhythm, you know, tasks that were in rhythm to the music. Second one is solfege, which is the Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Ti Do system, but taught very much in space so that, you know, your arm would go Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Ti Do. So you get the idea of sound as space or dimension. And the third one was improvisation. So that was my early training. So I love rhythm. Rhythm is one of my favorite elements. And in the Western European tradition, rhythmic articulation is not necessarily, particularly in the classical field. It's not necessarily like the primary element. The classical singers are taught much more about line, you know, line and long phrases. So as far as rhythm is concerned, I, there's not a particular one that I would go towards. As a matter of fact, I love, you know, fives and sevens and nines and then threes and fours and sixes and eights and then, yeah, so. So of artists or who inspire you, what artists do you follow? What is it, music? Is it film? I'm a film person. Tell us a little bit. What do you really follow? What do you watch? What are you passionate about? Well, I love film. You know, I adore film. What kind of films? Every kind of film. You know, give some examples. Well, you know, I'm a film history kind of buff. So I just saw Usmane Sembemé, the Senegalese filmmaker, one of his very early films in the 1960s called Black Girl. Did you ever see that film? It's a beautiful film. I mean, I think he had probably seen Godard and, you know, the French filmmakers, but it is exquisite. I mean, there's, I just love film, period. So you watch more film than theater performance? Yeah, in a way nowadays, yes, absolutely. Isn't that a terrible thing to say? No, no, no. Because I do believe in live performance. I mean, I think live performance is, as dinosaur as it may sound, and I am a dinosaur, but there's something about the being in the same room at the same time and that sense of touch that we get, you know, the tactility of that being in the same room at the same time that you never get in any other medium. I guess it's just more these days, I haven't seen things that inspire me too much. So then I just go back to my movies. So you watch them at home or you go to the movies? At home I go to the movies. I just went and saw A Fantastic Woman. Has anybody seen that one? That's a beautiful film. It's gorgeous. It's a Chilean film. So yeah, and I think there's some very nice films that are coming out now. I like them, but I also love film history very much. I saw Judex for the first time last week. Have you ever seen Judex? Anybody seen Judex? Do you know what it is? No? Wow! It's time we get on your Twitter feed. Do you watch? Oh yeah, sorry. So Judex is by a filmmaker named Frangieu and it was early, it was France in the early 60s, but he was inspired by Fantomas. So Fantomas was the faillade silent films of this kind of detective films from World War I. And I saw all of those. Even though silent film is hard because of the music, but I have to turn it off. I can't stand listening to it, but. But so it is such a wonderful film, Judex. I highly recommend it. It's wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. So do you also watch television series? These kind of long narrative forms that they've developed? I don't have a TV, but I do love series. I'm a complete, okay, you ready for this for junk? Yes. What are your favorites? Lawn Order, Orange is the New Black, Homeland, and RuPaul's Drag Race. Wow, well let's, since we now have collected to the audience maybe up there, make a bit of light up to our audience and maybe it's time we move on. I'm just gonna mention one thing that I don't know if people realize how many filmmakers use Meredith's music. For example, the recent letters from Baghdad. I can't wait to see that. I told you, I heard that. And then Tarantum Alec and the Godard, the Kohn brothers, so your music is in a lot of the films. I think it's gonna be really happy. It makes me, you know, because I think it is music that works for cinema, yeah. So maybe one day you develop a series and a film series. That would be great. For Netflix, why not? It might work. So we have an audience, Mike also, with Ilyda, so not only that we hear you better, but also because we are recording it and people need to hear it. So maybe if you have a question or just a comment, make sure that maybe say, introduce yourself and stand up very short and try to have it as a comment or a question, not too long, but not too short either. Hello, thank you. Thank you so much for this. This is a very special opportunity. I'm a dance person, so I would really love to hear you talk a little bit about dance in your work and choreography and gesture and the role that has played along with all of the film and music. Well, for example, in cellular songs, there is definitely a gestural language. It's pretty pared down, as I said, because of this idea of not wanting to have the movement element take over so much that the music becomes a kind of accompaniment. So it's very carefully thought through that it is so simple and transparent, the movement. But I think that cellular songs is also, like you could say, the choreographic aspect is almost the architectural aspect, how the bodies are in space, which is part of choreography, a very strong part of choreography. So it's not so much huge movement vocabulary, but it's much more how the figures are in space is a very choreographed and thought through element. Because I think as dancers, we have, space is something that we're just taught, it's like square one of our training, right? And because I came from both music and dance, it's very interesting because working, for example, with singers, especially from the classical tradition, they do not have, they are not trained in space. And I always, when I teach a workshop, I always say to everybody in the class, space is your ally, which even the voice in space, think of the voice in space, think of the voice, think of the voice pulling you, think of the voice pushing you, and really that, and music in space is your ally, you know, it's 360 degrees. So that's something that I think about to this day. And I think that my early days of doing the deep work into my own voice as a very young person, because I had that dance background as well, I knew how to go into a studio and work with my own voice as if I would be working with my body. And then also, I think that they're so unified to me, you know, there's no difference. And so I was also thinking about the voice as being a very kinetic and instrument and that my music is very kinetic. One, two, three. Hi, thank you. So I'm thinking about the sort of presentation of your films and some of the films that we saw today, you know, weren't necessarily meant to be screened just as films, or that's not how they were originally conceived, so I'm just curious about what you think about showing them in that sort of context. Well, I think the only one that wasn't supposed, well, are you talking about the face that should have been on a dome? Yeah, yeah. But actually, the black and white face was on a rectangle that was in front of a table, so it's pretty much the same kind of proportion. But the one that I would have probably, I decided to show it because it's in my short silent films, but is the ball bearing film of the bodies and the ball bearing, and that was really meant to be on a loop. And at that time, like monitors were very small, kind of on a small monitor, almost like it was in a room and you just looked at it. So that's the only one where it was, that was not the original kind of format. And I think that that kind of installation, kind of video installation is a really interesting, I still, I love installation, because I love that you have that participation. So it's something I'm, you know, and I'm very, I haven't worked in film for the last few years, I'm so happy that I worked in film and sell early songs. It feels so good to be working back in film again. Hi there. I am curious about your use of repetition. And in Paris, when I was watching it, I was wondering if you had a sense of the music and you were developing the movement in connection to the music, or like Martha Graham did not choreograph to music, she choreographed and created the structure of the dance and then it was married to music. Sometimes, that's not exactly true. Well, okay. Merce would be more like that. Well, but anyway, I know something about the her background with Horses. I met Louis Horton. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was always asleep in his composition classes. He'd be fast asleep. Right, right, right. But in any event, just in your particular case and it may change in different pieces, but did the music generate the movement or do they happen in some way simultaneously? And the repetition in that piece, there was one moment where I was like, did she count out or is she doing it spontaneously in terms of how many times you repeated something to have it work? Well, I'd love to know more specifically because that's a super interesting question. I mean, a repetition on the overall structure with Paris was that you first heard the music in the beginning that what we call Paris, that piano music and then it comes back and we do the dance to it. And the strange thing in that one is that's not what we, you know, we didn't even use that piano piece to work on the movement at all. We use other music. So it was actually pretty much like that. That Paris piano music was more like a landscape or something like that. So, but now, like for example, in cello songs there's something we call Charlie. That is, I have the music first and then it's loosely, the movement is loosely not with counts and everything, but it's loosely based on the quality of that music in the new piece cello songs. But Paris was more independent actually. But do you have a question? Well, this is- The music comes first and then the movement is an extension. Well, in Charlie, like a Charlie, which is just a piano piece, that's our big movement piece. The quality of Charlie was the inspiration for the movement, but it's not built in one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, the way that you would a dancer would do a choreography to a score or something like that. It's not how it- It's more like the atmosphere and then guide posts. But with Paris, I mean, I did repeat that piano piece twice in two different, the first overture where you see the pianist playing and then that was our movement thing. So that comes again. And that principle of bringing something back in a composition, I always find that very, very satisfying. In cellular songs, we do that click song, the mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, mm. I don't know if you notice it was very subtle, but during the second film where those big hands are coming on the screen, that's used as the track to that. So that thing where, again, it's sort of what we were talking about before about the cycles of time, that you might not be that aware of it, but it's very satisfying when something spirals back and then comes back around again instead of everything being one thing, the next thing, one thing. So I think it's kind of also a strategy of making a non-linear kind of forms, you know, more circular kind of forms. I feel like I haven't quite answered your question, but. Yeah. Close enough. And the third, there was one here. First in the middle, who was, yeah. I want to say thank you. I've been here since the beginning today. Oh my gosh, a marathon. And it was just wonderful. Thank you. I come from a classical music and theater background. And I'm particularly interested in the turtle dreams, but in as well as Alice Allen. I want to tell you that the person whose hands those were is right there, Nicky Parrazzo. Show your hands. And his eyes. And his beautiful eyes. I'm just wondering, is the choreography strictly delineated or are the performers, turtle dreams was much more. Turtle dreams, that was the first time I, it's sort of like, what was I thinking of? I was thinking that it's almost, what did I say? They're absolutely wed. You know, first I just had the music and then for some reason I was in my room and I started stepping back and forth. And then I realized, this is a kind of visualization of the music. And I hate that word because they're both equal, but that choreography is absolutely rigorously set. Okay. Yeah, absolutely. So interesting, thank you. Yeah. We would, you could never do it otherwise. It's so intricate. It would be really hard to do it because it's very geometric. Yeah. In that one section where we're really doing this big vlog, we, yeah, those are not absolutely set. Those are based on each of the characters that we had. Yeah, those are based on each of the characters that we had. Yeah, definitely. That's right. That's right. Hi, Meredith. Thank you also. Where are you? I'm over here. Is this on? Hello. Hi. I wanted to ask you about your use of humor because I know you're often dealing with some very serious themes, but you always managed to insert that joyful sense of play often in the gesture and just in so many brilliant ways. And I wondered what your thoughts were about that and how intentional that is, or if that's just your joie de vivre. Well, what a friend we have in Mozart. So in other words, I think that I would just, it would make me really sad to not have humor in a piece. I think humor is laughter is a way of, laughter can cut through anything. And I've always been, sometimes in the Western European tradition, although not Shakespeare, but it's like, is it a tragedy or is it a comedy? And I've always, I just never understood that. I just feel like I want the full palette of emotion in one piece. So I've always wanted to make sure that you had that release of laughter or that sense of humor. And also that sense of humor also always means, what is it? There's always an observer aspect to humor. So it means that you're not really carried away. It has that lightness of touch. So I think especially when you're dealing with very serious subjects that you just have to have those moments where you almost pull the lens back a little bit and you have the irony or the humor. I was thinking about, and to me the best works have that. Like most of you know the film La Citta Aperta which is Rossellini's film about World War II. It is one of the most, it's such a, it's an excruciatingly painful film about the occupation of Rome during World War II. I mean torture and everything. I mean it's excruciating. And there is a really hilarious scene in this where Animanyani's grandfather, excuse me, grandfather is in a building and the family's in the building and the Nazis are gonna come to get them. And he's yelling and groaning and screaming and hits him over the head with a frying pan. So it's just like bong and he's out. And there's no way that you, it's just really funny. And I just thought, wow, that's, we have to have that aspect in everything I think. No you're so welcome. So one, two, three. Hi Meredith. Hello. How are you? Okay, how are you? I love you. So I saw cellular songs twice. Got different, different impact each time. And I know you were saying that your intention is to create work that's timeless. However, I experienced cellular songs as being very timely. And I was wondering in this world that celebrates mediocrity. Whether you are feeling lately a particular responsibility to make work that is timely. Yeah, I mean, I think that all artists now are trying to contend with what's going on and what do we do and what's useful. And I think a lot of people feel that very, very, what would I say, very directly political work, direct political work is very useful. And I think that it is, if that's what you're meant to do and that's the way that you can express truth, then I think that very, very political work is very important. But I think there's another branch which is that there are some people that are thinking more in terms of a kind of antidote or the possibility of another way of doing things as a kind of antidote to the poison that's going on and offering alternative. So that's what I was trying to do in cellular songs, but I thought really, it took me three years to make that piece and I was really contending with how useful is it. I mean, I feel, I'm thinking all the time about trying to make art that's useful. And I think that art that is affirming life is useful because we need that very badly like to take courage and to know that this too will pass and that we will find our way through this. And so I think that that is a kind of template of the possibility of generosity, kindness, collaboration and cooperation rather than competition, hate and bullying and everything else is really important. So I was very, very aware of doing that. And Bonnie's beautiful essay that she wrote in the program talked about that, the aesthetics of what that would be. And then I think it helped people so much to, I'm so grateful, Bonnie, because I feel that people were able to dig down into the piece deeper because they read that. Thank you, Annette. Hello. I really appreciate that you're in a nonlinear, creative, kind of fertile, spacious spiritual awareness. And these are things that I personally share and I know what it is to be in the world with those qualities. I'm wondering how you relate being such a person and having such qualities to this culture which is so discursive and so based on linear time and so organized around marshaling material resources. How do you enter that fray and secure the funding and get the press kit done and make your presentation in a discursive way? Well, I actually have a wonderful team of people that I adore. Kirsten Kapustik is the director of my foundation. I have, and is Anna there? Where are you, Anna? Oh, I have the most, there's Anna. And then we have Peter. Is Peter here? No. So we have these beautiful young people that are helping me so much more than I can think of in many, many, many years. And I think that part of it is you have to to just keep going, you have to contend with the world as it is. But I think at the same time you can again offer an alternative of even an organization as an example of how does one in this corrupt world do your work with integrity? And the Buddhists would say write livelihood so we're not causing harm. There are these kinds of concerns that I think are at the basis of all of us and keep us going. But it's been a struggle for me my whole life. It's never, never been easy. It's still a struggle. But in a way, and sometimes it's very discouraging and very frustrating. But in a way, the thing is I would rather have my freedom. I think I've had a wonderful life because I've had my freedom. And sometimes that's having your freedom is worth not having those other things. So you just have to find in all those resources that you have, you just have to find your way of like, it's sort of like subverting in your own little way. It's sort of like subverting the culture. And then the other part of it is that when the man who has no name in this room was elected, I was just in despair. And then there's another part of me just said, I just felt another part of me just digging my heels in. Like I'm just gonna dig my heels in and I'm going to continue doing my work and I'm going to be quietly stubborn. But it's more like instead of going, eh, eh, it's more like, mm, it's just like thinking about it as a hum rather than as an explosion. And so, and it's really, really hard. And the values are, what kind of an example do we have? Plus the destruction that's already so much destruction and suffering and causing suffering. But I guess the way I feel, and this may be very naive, but I feel like art is the answer. The art is the antidote. Creativity and art, any kind of, or any good nursing or anything that comes from love. And then we're back to the Beatles again. How can we, love will always win. One, two more. So back to some early work. I wondered if you would talk about ball bearing. Especially in terms of the discoveries you were making then and what they have to do with the discoveries you're making and your new work. And the usefulness that you think attached or whether you even thought about usefulness when you were making it. I'm not sure that when I was at that age, I was 24, I was thinking about usefulness. But I was, when I first came to New York, my job, I hated being in an office and destroyed offices. You know, one, two, three, I was like, the files would be like all mixed up in everything I hated office. So how I earned my living was to model for artists. You know, artists that I respected. So I, and most of my colleagues had no problem with the human body at all. So ball bearing was really more like just making a study of the human body, you know, as kind of architecture or, you know, visually. And what I was working on there was I was shooting in high eight. I had shot in 16. I was shooting in high eight. And then I made this crazy discovery that if you developed high eight on a 60 millimeter stock you got, the screen was divided into four. And you got like those two, you got four images on screen. So it was really more like a visual discovery. And then I wanted a counter balance to that. So I did that in the center, that little teeny ball bearing that you could see reflective. So it was more visual. I was just working with that film as a visual thing. And I had already thought of it more as a kind of installation. Is it good? And you know, and just, and let me tell you I had this, oh my boy. Like in 1969, there was a woman, Carol Russell who I had actually adored. I came to adored, to adore. I showed that film in this scandalous concert at the Billy Rose Theater where I was called the disgrace to the name of theater. You know, and it was, I should have never done the, you know, it was in a series of concerts. I should have said no. So that, you know, I know no shut up, get out now for Toni Morrison. But I should have said no then. But so then after that, which I didn't really want to do because I was already starting to work on the site specific kind of work. So going back to a proscenium stage was very painful for me. So I was gonna be doing a piece, first I did a piece at the Museum of Natural History in Washington at the Smithsonian called Tour Dedicated to Dinosaurs. And that was a wonderful big piece with masses of people in it and the audience walked around. And then the second one in that series was in Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art. And this woman, Carol Russell who was maybe in her 70s at that time was my, you know, was bringing me. She hired me. So I remember, and she had come to the Billy Rose Theater. And so she, I remember sitting with her at her house and she said, we're not, you know, that film. We're not ready for you yet. And I said, and I don't know how I had the courage. And I said, Carol, it's too late. You already hired me. And then because I said that, she just loved me. And we, you know, it was very successful there and we got to be friends for life. So even at that time, it was sort of weird. I guess frontal nudity was sort of, but as I said, I was an artist model. I mean, we never thought a second thought about it, really. You know, in those days. Will you do more installation here? I'm working on the one for cellular songs and, you know, I'm working on it as an installation by itself. So kind of excited about that. Yeah. We're coming a little bit closer to a time. We're gonna have a little reception, but maybe as a final question, what are you working on now? What are your future projects for the next, I don't know, how many years? Are you planning five years? Two? No. So what are you doing? What's on your book? Well, now we're working on performing cellular songs in different places. We're supposed to go to Russia at the end of June if there's any relationship between the United States and Russia by then. One of the wonderful performers is here, Joe Stewart, right over there from cellular songs. And then some other places in the United States next fall, but then there's two or three projects that are happening. And a new project that I've also been thinking about for a lot, many, many years, and I may actually even put some of cellular songs within this even larger structure is a piece called Indra's Net, which I'm gonna do with some members of San Francisco Symphony and My Ensemble at Mills College. And that's more, that I'm thinking of as a gigantic site specific walk through kind of musical installation, live musical installation. And then the third big thing that's coming up right now is that Yuval Chiron who's a wonderful young opera director who's based in LA was that I did, a few years ago I was in a piece of John Cage song books with San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas. I sang with Joan the Barbara and Jesse Norman and I were the singers. And it was really great and Yuval was the director and he was wonderful. And I just love him very much. And he's a young, really energizer bunny, young director. And he said that when he was in Berkeley he listened to Atlas every night and every day. And so he said before he died and before I died he wanted to do his production of Atlas and he's going to do it. So, and I went through the whole piece with him and I'm going to be in on the casting but that's it. I'm not singing. I'm not singing neither. As I said to him, I don't, he said I want you to approve everything. I was like listen, I'd rather do my own damn production. So if you're going to do your production, telly ho. I will be there for the casting which is really important and I will tell you all the principles. But basically he's taking the score and we're going to see if it will be like La Boheme when I'm gone it will still hold up or not. And if not, that's also okay. Well, there's a lot of things to look forward to and to join and I saw the two assistants try a little bit when she said that big production site specific which you are planning about. So this is going to be a great work. Thank you so much for sharing. Thank you all for coming and congratulations. Thank you so much for coming.