Part of Music City Mondays
Meredith Monk — composer, performer and interdisciplinary artist — is one of the great artistic pioneers of our time, yet her profound cultural in?uence is largely unrecognized outside of certain circles. With Monk’s music at its center, and featuring interviews with Björk and David Byrne, MONK IN PIECES is a mosaic that mirrors the structure of Monk’s own work, and illuminates her wildly original vocabulary of sound and imagery. As a female artist in the male-dominated downtown arts scene of the ‘60s and ‘70s, Monk had to fight for recognition and resources. Early reviews in the New York Times were vicious and sexist — “A disgrace to the name of dancing,” wrote one critic, and “so earnestly strange in a talented little-girl way,” wrote another. Yet as her celebrated contemporary, Philip Glass, says, “she, among all of us, was — and still is — the uniquely gifted one.” In the ?lm’s ?nal chapters, we see her warily entrust her masterpiece, ATLAS, to director Yuval Sharon and singer Joanna Lynn-Jacobs for a new production at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. For 60 years, Monk has directed and performed in all of her music theater — but now she must learn to let go. What will happen to such singular work after she is gone?
“It can be hard to pinpoint why, or even how, Billy Shebar’s MONK IN PIECES is so much better and more involving than the average documentary about the life of an artist…. [The film] transcends its format because it’s less the story of an artist than it is the story of artistry itself — of what it does, of why we need it, and of how it survives in the face of a world that loves discovery almost as much as it hates anything it hasn’t already heard or seen before.” —David Erlich, IndieWire
“‘What do you even call this?’ asks one academic in this documentary, referring to the remarkable musical and performance work of Meredith Monk which, 60 years after she began her career, continues to defy easy classification. Rather than answer that question directly, directors Billy Shebar and David C Roberts present the rich tapestry of her music, which is frequently based around soaring vocalisations that swoop and loop across her three-octave range, sometimes sounding primal, sometimes futuristic and everything in between.” —Amber Wilkinson, Screen Daily