TBT: Meredith Monk on the Pressure to Do Something New
In the April 1976 issue of Dance Magazine, writer Robb Baker penned a lengthy survey of his experiences watching the works of Meredith Monk, who appeared on the cover, beginning with his first encounter with her multidisciplinary performance pieces (Tour 2: Barbershop) in Chicago in spring 1969.
“Meredith Monk has an uncanny knack for making the private public, the personal universal,” Baker wrote. “Her works are in no way ‘confessional’ or even particularly autobiographical, yet they seem subjective in a highly unusual way in that they touch off memories from the viewer’s own past or subconscious mind. Monk’s works are all journeys, in a sense, back to a kind of collective childhood of shared images, shared traditions.”
In a conversation for the cover story (though she “doesn’t like interviews at all, in fact,” Baker noted), Monk observed, “This whole idea of having to do something ‘new’ is very unhealthy, I think. What’s so good about being new? There’s something very American about that, very New York. There’s a lot of destruction going on in this culture…. It’s like here people are so afraid of old age, when actually if old people keep themselves open, they can add a lot more than anyone to society. We’re simply not a culture based on growth. Or depth.”
