Even the Bushes Are Not to be Trusted

The Village Voice 4 Nov 1971English

item doc

It would be foolish to speculate whether Meredith Monk’s Vessel is more properly dance or music or theatre; any of the arts should be happy to claim it. However, to keep matters straight: Monk calls it “an opera epic.”

Vessel, like the earlier Juice, is in three related parts, which happen in three different places. Also as in Juice, the same, or closely related, characters and events appear in each of the three parts, but each time are constellated differently in regard to time or space. The six “House people” (Lanny Harrison, Daniel Ira Sverdlik, Signe Hammer, Monica Moseley, Mark Monstermaker, and Blondell Cummings) sit  initially in a loft’s living area, slowly and soberly performing minute, invisible chores with their hands; each at some time does a “turn” in another costume under a lightbulb which each switches on. (E.g., Monster-maker sheds his formal black suit and bowler hat and enters as a red robed, fully crowned king or cardinal. He recites the first two lines of the Paternoster in French and flings a handful of coins on the ground.) These second costumes are what the house people wear for extended roles as “mountain people” in Part II. By Part III, they are dressed in black again, sitting in the little living room that has been assembled in a huge parking lot. This thematic use of material is everywhere in Vessel: a man who plays an accordion in Part I strums a dulcimer in Part II, and formally gives way to a French-horn player in Part III.

Every act is a key to every other act. The work is like an immense jig-saw puzzle in which - as you begin it - you aren’t sure which blue pieces are sky and which are lake (even the bushes are not to be trusted); only when you find blue-with-fish or blue-with-cloud can you know where you are. As you watch Vessel you find yourself sorting and bundling images in your mind against the moment when the proper place will open up for them. Some remain mysterious: you admire their grandeur and know that Meredith Monk knows where they belong.

The layers of subject matter are astonishing. One of the most important shaping ones is the life and death of Joan of Arc. Mixed with the specific hagiological fragments are bits seemingly related to broader based religious ritual, plus elements from Monk’s earlier pieces. For example, it is no coincidence that the camping pioneers (straight out of Monk’s Needlebrain Lloyd and the Systems Kid) cluster around fires and dance out with corn and that the last performance occurred on Hallowe’en, the ancient harvest festival once celebrated with bonfires. Also a figure with a huge flaming torch appears on the wall of the parking lot. Also at the very end of everything, Monk in her “Joan” costume (silver gray jeans and t-shirt, silver-paint on her hands, forearms, and in a helmet pattern around her face and neck), but with a Chaplinesque bowler hat on, dances all alone across the big, dark, now-empty lot - a very light, skittering dance, as if she were a dry leaf being blown, or a tiny puppet - and immolates herself in the flare and sparks of a welder’s torch. Fire as ritual, as specific history, and as personal fantasy (the burning doll at the end of Monk’s 16 millimeter earrings).

The changing spaces permit different ways of revealing the subject. Vessel progresses from private to public (Juice went the opposite way). The first part, “Overture: Open House,” moves quietly and slowly, almost conversationally - except that there is no conversation. The people in black make small adjustments in position. Monk recites a key speech from Shaw’s St. Joan twice; once she merely whispers it.

Part II, “Handmade Mountain,” happens at the Performing Garage where unbleached muslin has been draped over the existing scaffolding and platforms to make little grottoes in which the mountain people perform their particular tasks with real props (e.g., the king reads, the necromancer mixes fluids, the peasant or gypsy woman cooks in an iron pot). They also communicate across to each other in musical calls. The pace is more “theatrical” at the Garage. And the atmosphere is that of a court - both regal and judicial. There is a wonderfully sinister, and silly, row of courtiers in flowered robes posing and chattering high up on one side of the scaffolding. There is a pallid juggler and a bit of buffoonery between an idiotic king and queen (excellently done by Ping Chong and Lanny Harrison). It was a brilliant idea to have Joan’s inquisitor, Bishop Cauchon, played by two people, a man and a woman. They take turns tossing insane questions and statements into space (“Let’s dispense with the business and get down to formalities,” or “Is there any more baked Alaska?”). Martin Gleitsman is deadly, mellow-voiced, and professional; Coco Pekelis hisses her lines, narrowing her eyes and composing her face into a sneer after each delivery.

Part III, “Existent Lot,” is like a field of battle, a public square. Some occurrences are magnified by the space; others, like the group in the living room, compressed by it, lost in it. The two figures in headpieces who spar briefly with rakes in Part I have become two armies advancing from opposite sides of the parking lot. In Part I, a waterfall is the long and false hair unrolled from a disembodied gray head; in Part II, a waterfall is a line of people in blue and gray jeans and shirts tumbling slowly from the scaffolding, somersaulting across the white-draped floor and looping back up another ladder; in Part III a waterfall emerges from a group of Hallowe’en revelers who wind through a crowd of still figures dispensing ears of corn.

It is impossible to describe the richness of Monk’s conception - visually, aurally, and intellectually. So much happens in depth as well as in a linear manner that the printed word cannot in any way convey the experience. Many of the sounds and images are startlingly beautiful: Lanny Harrison begins the whole thing as a disembodied voice, outlining in a marvelous kind of sprechtstimme the delivery to certain persons of directions and messages and maps (hidden inside a nut, etc.); a dark woman and a fair man, both naked from the waist up, sitting at a kitchen table side by side (reminiscent of the couple in Blueprint); Monk, dimly lit, her hair hanging in a score of tiny plaits, playing the electric organ, and wheedling strange sounds from the back of her throat; the mountain people ritualistically making salads - no sound but the crisp tearing of fresh lettuce leaves; a group far away in the parking lot waving and swaying in front of a wall, the shadow of a leafless tree huge behind them and swaying too; three people in pale clothing illuminated in the porticoes of the church across the street from the parking lot, waving slowly. There are motorcycles and buses and children playing and a Spanish dancer and many visions and revelations that interlock, that unlock. A treasure hunt that you pursue but needn’t fathom because of all the prizes along the way.