Film & Gespräch: Monk in Pieces / Meredith Monk zu Gast!

In the organizer's words:

Meredith Monk, Pina Bausch Visiting Professor at the Folkwang University of the Arts, is a guest at Filmstudio Glückauf!

The documentary portrays the composer, performer and interdisciplinary artist Meredith Monk. Billy Shebar was able to accompany Monk for years and was given access to her unique archive, photos and diaries.

Meredith Monk - composer, performer and interdisciplinary artist - is one of the great artistic pioneers of our time, yet her profound cultural influence has gone largely unrecognized. With Monk's music at its center and interviews with Björk and David Byrne, "Monk in Pieces" is a mosaic that reflects the structure of Monk's own work and illuminates her highly original vocabulary of sounds and images.As an artist in the male-dominated downtown New York art scene of the 1960s and '70s, Monk had to fight for recognition. The first reviews in the New York Times were vicious and sexist: "A disgrace to the name of dancing" wrote Clive Barnes and "so earnestly strange in a talented little-girl way" wrote John Rockwell. But as her celebrated contemporary Philip Glass says, "she was and is the only gifted one of us all". In the final chapters of the film, Monk confronts mortality. We see her entrusting her masterpiece ATLAS to director Yuval Sharon and singer Joanna Lynn-Jacobs for a new production at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. For 60 years, Monk has directed and acted in all of her musical theater works; now she must learn to let go. What will happen to this unique work when she is gone?