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Meredith Monk: Inner Voice (2009)
Produced and Directed by Babeth M. Van Loo
Distributed by First Run Features
www.firstrunfeatures.com
82 minutes
Philip Bither, senior curator at Minneapolis' Walker Art Center, notes in an interview that Meredith Monk is "one of the seminal people of our time. She resists categorization and has created great work in five, six areas of art. That's really rare. We tend to categorize people as actors, singers, dancers." Produced by the Buddhist Broadcast Foundation, the documentary Meredith Monk: Inner Voice, through a slowly building collection of interviews, archival performance clips, and behind the scenes footage, connects the spiritual life of performer/director/composer/ choreographer/filmmaker Meredith Monk, who first made a splash in New York City in the 1960s, thanks to the various performance pieces she created. Some of her work will be familiar to many: fans of The Big Lebowski, for example, would have heard "The Walking Song," which she wrote and performed, on the film's soundtrack. However, perhaps because of her versatility and the difficulty of categorizing performance pieces featuring vocal music containing no words, Monk, in spite of her longevity as a performer, is not a household name.
One of the pleasures of this documentary is the extended time spent with Monk's various performances. Director Babeth Van Loo takes care to frame the initial encounters with Monk's work with interviews of Monk and her collaborators, so that even it is not always clear what a particular piece is about, how it felt to perform the piece or what it means to Monk, is articulated. Later, the performances - including early avant-garde films, recordings of past pieces, and Songs of Ascension in rehearsal and performed contexts - are often presented without any commentary, voiceovers, or rapid-fire editing; this practice increases as...