Monk Charms with Polyphonic Chant

Nobody ever stops talking at Harvard. Whether it's your T.F. droning on about the 350 pages you haven't read, your roommate endlessly analyzing why Miss Right never looks at him in the e-mail line at Lamont, or the "Spare Change" man by Au Bon Pain going "ooh, beautiful ladies!" someone's always talking. So maybe that's why Meredith Monk's "A Celebration Service"--an interdisciplinary performance based around Monk's powerful non-verbal vocalizations held at Sanders on April 23--was so refreshing.

Or maybe it was that my feet hurt. A hectic Harvard schedule, three-inch heeled boots and hard cement walkways don't usually combine to produce happy feet at the end of the day, and Friday night was no exception. So when a satin and linen-clad chanter from Monk's ensemble recited a 20th century Hasidic saying in a soothing voice, I felt like I was receiving free counseling for the world-weary. "Put off thy shoes from thy feet," he chanted as contented audience members rustled with laces, "put off the habitual which encloses your foot and you will recognize that you happen to be standing at this moment on holy ground."

Certainly Monk is not the first to deem this ground holy, as any number of euphoric pre-frosh wandering around last weekend demonstrated. But one of the hallmarks of the performance was Monk's uncanny ability to infuse the everyday with a simple, unadorned spirituality. The Service, according to Monk's literature, "celebrates the universal quest for spirituality" with a mixture of seemingly simple choral chants, organ music, processionals and poems that span both history and religion. With the combination of these differing elements Monk successfully avoids the always enticing "universal answer for spirituality" so popular with televangalists and new-age gurus, instead creating a physical as well as psychological space for reflection.

The idea of "sacred spaces"--spaces that Monk says can be "everywhere and anywhere"--is a constantly recurring theme in Monk's work, a reflection of her 15 years of meditation. In "Celebration Service", Monk used the space offered by Sanders completely, placing singers at the edge of the upper balcony, in the aisles next to the audience and at one point even placing the two chanters on the catwalk above the stage.

And while this may seem risqué to all of us who are used to the more sedate postures of our favorite professors, this use of space was indeed tame for Monk. At an outdoor performance at Connecticut College in the late 1960s, Monk used six horses, 25 motorcycles, multiple tents, a boat and a VW van during a performance that lasted from 4pm to 10pm, with dinner served in the middle. For another performance, Monk used a goat, which she later deemed "highly unsuccessful," as the hungry goat ate the set, which had been composed entirely of straw.

So although Monk is an artist of few words, it should come as no surprise that she declares "I'm not a noun, I'm a verb!" And indeed, no one who's seen Monk and her company in performance would disagree. She rejects the traditional titles of "singer," "dancer," "choreographer" and "composer" and lets her work suggest its own categorization as it (and she) leaps from dance to poetry to extended vocal technique, an emotionally charged form of singing expressed using only singular sounds, and no words.

A single member of the ensemble began the performance by singing a beautiful, haunting solo from the edge of the balcony in Sanders, with a single spotlight illuminating her face. Soon the rest of the singers processed in through the side doors, and began the first of the songs in the "extended vocal technique style."

Suddenly I was terrified that all my pre-conceived notions of "performance art" (drawn mostly from the examples so readily available in the Square at this time of year, I confess) were about to come true. The sounds were full of emotion, but unable to abandon my verbal vocabulary, I found myself furiously scribbling poor analogy after poor analogy on my program in a vain attempt to translate the sounds and dancing into a familiar syntax.

By the time the next song, an audience participation piece, began, I found myself relieved to see that there was set music and words (albeit they were only "ah-ah-ah") printed in the program for us to follow. But it was only after I witnessed my own--the audience's own--complete inability to sing even the melody of this song did I understand the amount of skill and talent needed to produce these intricate songs.

Monk's talent has hardly gone unnoticed, as she's been the recipient of a prestigious MacArthur "Genius" award, two Guggenheim fellowships and a Scripps American Dance Festival award. But perhaps more of a testament to her work is the obvious happiness her company projected while performing, and the fact that Sanders was at full capacity.

Or maybe it was because my feet had stopped hurting.