W HO or what is Meredith Monk? It is a more serious question than it sounds for Monk is avowedly an “interdisciplinary” artist, who has had more honors and grants bestowed upon her, including a MacArthur Genius Award, than Jesse Helms could shake a stick at.
Her new work, “Magic Frequencies,” which had its world premiere in Munich last October, and is now receiving its United States premiere at the Joyce Theater, is described as “a science-fiction chamber opera.”
The 56-year-old, New York-bred Monk has “conceived, directed and composed” this dance-theater piece, and, of course, choreographed it. And although Monk likes to think of herself primarily as a composer, other people, disconcertingly, appear to regard her more of a dancer/choreographer.
She is indeed a Jill-of-all-trades, or, to put it more culturally, an exponent of that Wagnerian ideal of total art, called in German the “Gesamskunstwerk.”
“Magic Frequencies” – the title refers to wave patterns emitted by hydrogen and Monk’s apparent belief that “if extraterrestrial intelligence were to exist, communication would take place via these frequencies” – is the latest work of Monk’s company “The House.”
There is nothing, however, particularly extraterrestrial about the work itself, which keeps its feet firmly on terra firma.
Her music, highly rhythmic and vocally here using melodic sounds in place of words, is the background to stage pictures that appear to be a kind of disassociated reality. The audience occasionally giggles at all the sweet mad oddity of it all, but there is not an overwhelming imagination involved in its creation.
The set pieces – a meal with the participants loudly crunching corn-cobs; a man dying in bed; a ballroom; two people meeting, nuzzling and parting in a video resemblance of the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris; and a female TV anchor blandly announcing horrors enough to make Quentin Tarantino blanch – are interwoven with little jiggly dances and lighting effects.
It’s not boring. And it’s not interesting. It’s just there. As a director Monk makes commanding use of stillness – it’s her strongest point.
The really strange thing about contemporary avant-garde art (and Monk is considered among the more avant) in that most of it could have been created at any time since the ’20s. Yet actually in the ’20s avant-garde artists were doing things that had really never been done before. Bizarre.
Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Ave. at 19th Street; (212) 242-0800. Through Sunday.
