Composer back with lively mix of music, dance
Within the magical world of creator Meredith Monk, language and music and movement all flow seamlessly into one another. Harmonies and nonsense syllables, emotions and physical gestures — these are fungible commodities in her artistic economy, each one capable of inspiring a mixture of reverence and joy.
At 78, Monk continues to conjure up unclassifiable expressive landscapes, each one a blend of music, dance, theatrical mythology and sometimes film. Her most recent work, “Indra’s Net,” had a predictably difficult gestation thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic — much of it was developed and workshopped over Zoom — but it finally saw the light over the weekend in two glorious performances at Mills College.
For devotees of Monk’s work, it was like an exuberant homecoming. The performance in the college’s Littlefield Concert Hall on Saturday — also live-streamed for a wider audience not there in person — offered a compact 80-minute exploration of some of her characteristic modes.
Monk and her seven collaborators, all clad in white, moved through gentle choreographic figures — ring dances, pointillist stage patterns, gatherings that registered like meetings of some angelic town council. They intoned wordless chordal harmonies, often unfolding in long paired sequences that mimicked the bodily dualities of breathing and heartbeat.
From time to time they held conversations in a language none of us has ever learned (“Htt! Donggg...” “kay-o, kay-o, kay-o”). An elaborate rhythmic etude is created out of clacking teeth and clucking tongues.
Meanwhile, an ensemble of 15 skilled instrumentalists drawn mostly from the Mills community flanked the stage, contributing intermittent accompaniment and often entering into the discussion individually. Instrumental music has been a comparatively late addition to Monk’s creative arsenal, but her writing here was full of sparkle and inventiveness.
The piece’s title, according to Monk’s spoken remarks from the stage, is drawn from a Buddhist myth about a bejeweled mesh that overhangs the sky, symbolizing the interconnectedness of the world and its inhabitants. But looking for a literal narrative in Monk’s work is usually a mug’s game. (“Atlas,” her majestic three-act opera from 1991, is a rare exception.)
Instead, one periodically catches thematic links and expressive echoes,
often cast in different guises. One current running through “Indra’s Net” is the process of passing along lore and cultural traditions from one generation to the next.
This is alluded to in the opening tableau, in which the ensemble members sit next to one another on chairs and gently shift their open palms from their own knees to those of their neighbors. The effect is like a pass-along parlor game, only with greater stakes.
Elsewhere, musical snippets are tossed from one singer to another in a spirit of learning. Sometimes this happens with a vaudevillian degree of comic timing, as when the performance pauses while two performers wordlessly debate, with exaggerated impatience and furrowed brows, the correct pronunciation of kaninessina — where “pronunciation” somehow includes both vowel sounds and melodic pitches.
As a supplement, Monk’s 10-minute film “Rotation” is on display as an installation at nearby Lisser Hall. Its imagery — silhouettes of the company members turning in slow arabesques — is echoed in the sumptuous conclusion of “Indra’s Net,” an expansive, evergrowing chorale that breathes in and out with the audience and perhaps the cosmos.