11
Mar/18

MEREDITH MONK AND VOCAL ENSEMBLE: CELLULAR SONGS

11
Mar/18
(photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble will present world premiere of Celluar Songs at the BAM Harvey this week (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St.
March 14-18, $25-$55
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.meredithmonk.org

Eclectic New York City multidiscplinary artist Meredith Monk will unveil her latest work this week at BAM, presenting the world premiere of Cellular Songs at the Harvey March 14-18. The multimedia performance comprises voice, movement, light, site-specific video installation, instrumental music, and film; Monk, who made her BAM debut in 1976 with Quarry and was last at the Brooklyn institution in 2014 with On Behalf of Nature, will be joined by four members of her Vocal Ensemble, Ellen Fisher, Katie Geissinger, Allison Sniffin, and Jo Stewart in her Monk debut. The seventy-five-minute piece, which examines humanity’s interdependence with nature in a tech-driven world, features costumes and scenography by Yoshio Yabara, lighting by Joe Levasseur, sound design by Eli Walker, and video design by Kate Freer. Cellular Songs follows On Behalf of Nature, which Monk calls “a meditation on what we’re in danger of losing”; the new work is inspired by the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddartha Mukherjee. Speaking about the new work at Jim Hodges’s Queenslab last June, Monk, equating human cells to musical cells, says, “I started thinking that I was going deeper into On Behalf of Nature, going way inside the body but also from microcosm all the way to the universe to macrocosm, so it’s really that contrast and also between organic forms and the individual human beings and those realms.” You can get a sneak peek at Monk & Vocal Ensemble rehearsing Cellular Songs at Abrons Arts Center here.