Word: monke
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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...
...defined tradition fully explains Monk's work. What does are the 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...
Transformation implies time. Monk works with the notion that all ages of the individual are within reach. Her time is not the linear time of narrative, although two "narrators" do appear with banners to title several sections. It's the time of dreams, its only logic being sequence. Events are condensed and distorted, displaced from their familiar contexts...
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...