Meredith Monk: between time and timelessness in Book of Days.

In Meredith Monk's classic feature-length film Book of Days, time plays a central role in creating a Jewish narrative that is simultaneously inside and outside time. Monk gives us a glimpse into the Middle Ages through a twentieth-century lens, then reverses that lens to have her medieval characters look at the twentieth century through their own lens, changing the way we think consciously of time as the distinction between earlier and later. A madwoman and a young Jewish girl are conduits of time: The young girl has visions of the future; the madwoman sees all of history; yet they are understood only by each other. As the plague spreads across Europe, the visions of the madwoman and the Jewish girl remind us that the miraculous and the monstrous are dual forces that conspire to create a oneness and a continuity of life.

Avant-garde singer, dancer, multimedia performance artist, composer, director and choreographer of epic works, opera, music, theater and film, New York based artist Meredith Monk (b. 1942) has been at the forefront of interdisciplinary performance for more than 40 years, integrating elements from each of the major artistic disciplines and breaking down the boundaries between them, pushing the limits of what it means to be an American performing artist today. Whether working in solo, group performances, theater, dance or film, Monk has sustained extraordinary intensity of vision and continuous invention.

Monk's work is fundamentally linked to time and her notion of it as a recurring cycle that can be experienced in new ways, allowing for a more hopeful and compassionate approach to life at a time when the world of feelings seems all but entirely removed from our global discourse. Essential to her artistic vision, time becomes the vehicle for a honed rendering of life, one that affirms feelings and emotions beyond the reach of words. By excavating out of life the essence of memory, thought and feeling, Monk gives her audience an intuitive means to reflect more deeply on their own experience and perceptions, and more fully to realize the magic and wonder of life.

Monk's 1988 film Book of Days conceptualizes time while synthesizing the Jewish content of her work. Twentieth-century New York City construction workers dynamite a brick wall, breaking through the limits of present time, into a Jewish community in fourteenth-century Europe. This opens the way for Monk to take us on a journey back in time and forward to an ever-evolving future, puncturing our perceptions of time and space in ways that range from the personally poignant to the traumatic: a vision of collective planetary devastation. The plague is about to consume all of Europe, yet the Jews carry on their timeless traditions. As the characters in Book of Days attest, there is always a ticking bomb for the Jews--"trouble always comes," but "it also goes." Within this Jewish narrative, Monk expresses her sense of timelessness and of the human spirit, and her concern for all the suffering of the world.

"I work in between the cracks, where the voice starts dancing, where the body starts singing, where theater becomes cinema."--Meredith Monk

The first time I heard Meredith Monk sing "Gotham Lullaby" (Dolmen Music, ECM 1981), it seemed I was hearing sounds I had never heard before, yet recognized intuitively as ancestral voices calling me from a place of collective memory. I felt transported into an eerily familiar primal past and at the same time into a heightened state of consciousness. Then, when I saw her beautifully haunting short film Ellis Island (1981), in which phantom-like figures of America's immigrant past come to life, I realized how characteristic this is of Monk's work. She has striven toward an art that reaches back in time, conjuring up the ghosts and spirits of our ancestors so that we can feel their presence, creating a state of coexistence with them in the hope of "making us feel more alive," (1) even as we face our own mortality. Within this vast human community, the universal is bound to become personal. My grandparents--like Monk's, east European Jews who went through the harsh journey by boat to America only to be put through another ordeal on Ellis Island--re resurrected and rendered with reverence in Ellis Island.

In Book of Days, Monk recreates the past much as she does in Ellis Island, using color in portraying the present, black and white for the past, and music to evoke timelessness. Just as Ellis Island begins with workmen in hard hats and reflective vests leading the way into recent ruins at New York Harbor that house the ghosts of America's immigrant past, Book of Days begins with workmen exposing a street in a medieval village, set against the anti-Semitic laws posted on village walls and the impending plague for which the Jews will be blamed. The world and time in which the medieval characters live and move is as realistic as it is mythic, yet those distinctions are continuously blurred. One moment time stands still; in the next, it fast-forwards to the twentieth century and beyond. Twentieth-century events are juxtaposed with medieval ones, the primordial with the futuristic: Monk depicts all of history happening at once. Modern characters enter the lives of medieval characters, sometimes to interview them, sometimes to entertain them, but always to create the sense that they, and by extension, we, are one community.