Word: girlchild
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...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...
...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...
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...
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...