Dream Journeying

THE IDEA OF evolving a work only for women sparked Education of the Girlchild, its creator Meredith Monk, a guest of the "Learning from Performers" series, told students Saturday afternoon. Monk, whose company, "The House," performed at the Loeb this weekend, spoke of extending the range of "archetypes" women have portrayed in the theater. Admitting a debt to Jung, she talked about her search for images within her psyche which mirror others' deepest imaginings.

Parts of Education of the Girlchild--such as one section of swirling white-veiled figures mesmerized by the masked idol "Ancestress"--feel like ritual, reflections of the "primordial reality" Monk mentioned Saturday. Yet the total work is not the translation of primitive dance into modern forms. Monk seems to have happened on primitivism in the course of realizing her own sensibility. In the same way she happens on surrealism, fantastic images grounded in reality, and on the style of Oriental theater, the integration of gesture, music and decor.

No defined tradition fully explains Monk's work. What does are the implications of the idea of "range"--not only the range of women's roles in the theater, but the range of possibilities open to each performer and to the ensemble. Choice--the traveling from possibility to possibility, through possibilities--in short, transformation is what Education of the Girlchild is all about.

There are no abrupt transitions in the work. Each of six characters retains a unique sense of herself while passing through subtle inflections of mood. The coda "Velvets" summarizes the piece well: five women in long velvet gowns turn slowly in place, evolving a series of gestures suggesting fright, aloofness, serenity.

Transformation implies time. Monk works with the notion that all ages of the individual are within reach. Her time is not the linear time of narrative, although two "narrators" do appear with banners to title several sections. It's the time of dreams, its only logic being sequence. Events are condensed and distorted, displaced from their familiar contexts.

Part I of the two-part Education of the Girlchild centers on the six women, definite characters yet impossible to type. Like figures in a dream, they're several personae blurred into one. Monk relates that her company struggled for a year and a half to make concrete these shadows of their selves. Coco Pekalis is a tiny child, an automaton, a Peruvian peasant; Lanny Harrison, a refined matron and a tomboy. Monica Moseley reads a book, clenches her fist defiantly, carries a globe on her head as her emblem. In the same procession, Blondell Cummings carries a lizard, Lee Nagrin a tree and Monk a house.

THAT HER GROUP can't mime on stage, Monk implies with words. Cataloguing possibilities the ensemble chose not to act out, Pekalis near the end of Part I narrates in a clear voice:

Synopsis of the opera so far: one went to the desert...one preferred her coffee black...one played with fire...one wore red...one died alone...

Monk too recites an epic catalog. Earlier, before she's spirited away under the blue veil of "Familiar," "Death's" companion, Monk chortles like a witch:

I still have my hands, and my mind, and my toes, oh, I live my toes...And I still have my gold ring...my house, my philosophy.

Her words point away from the multiple characters and episodic structure of part I to Monk's tightly-compressed solo in part II, away from the discovery of a collective past to the memory of an individual past. Monk roots part I in gesture, part II in song.

Monk begins her solo huddled on a stool--an old, old woman in white leggings and frock. Traveling down a long white cloth, she journeys backwards in time. Her gestures compact layer upon layer of implied meaning. Wide-armed swaying conjures up the image of a little girl dancing to the hypnotic rhythms of her favorite ditty, but suggests too an ancient woman casting nets, sowing grain, soothing a child.

Monk solos to her own compositions for voice and organ (the latter resonate through part I as well). Monk says she discovered in 1966 that "voice has a spine," that she could use her fully mature voice the way she was trained to use her dancer's body. Ever since, she's worked on finding the connection between dance of the voice and of the body.

During her solo, Monk's voice moves from full-throated chanting to feathered warbling to splintered wailing. Her last cry evokes the image of an old Eskimo, or ancient squaw, or fairy-tale granny calling the spirits to accompany her passage from her death-bed.

Monk's medium isn't space, the choreographer's domain; it's time, the concern of the composer. She could sing before she could speak and read music before reading books. "Music is my first language," she says. Coming from a family of musicians, she nevertheless resisted the family tradition and turned to dance.

Education of the Girlchild, Monk implied Saturday, is a turning back. Through it she comes to terms with her roots--the native tongue of Orpheus.