Turtle Dreams

This film is a rich and haunting reinvention of medieval life that never loses its contemporary perspective. When the plague afflicts a village, this world seems to go up in an apocalypse of hatred and disease that presages our own century.

Monk’s meditation on WWII and recurring cycles of intolerance, fascism, and cruelty in history originated in 1976 as a live stage work utilizing elements of music, images, movement, dialogue, film, sound, and light. This film version, shot on 16mm in the Lepercq Space at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1977, was created in partnership with the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts as part of their initiative to document ground-breaking live performance for future restaging. QUARRY centers on a sick American child (played by Monk herself) whose world darkens as her illness progresses, this darkening including the rise of a dictator. A unique document of this innovative, boundary-blurring production, and a work of art on its own terms, replete with a film-within-a-film directed by Monk in 1975.

Early 16mm film by Meredith Monk also presented as an installation piece to play continuously forward and backward for an unrestricted time period.

Meredith Monk's "Ellis Island" is a haunting, reflective piece on Ellis Island and the immigrants who passed through there.

A filming of Meredith Monk and Ping Chong's 1973 experimental theatre piece.

A beguiling short from Meredith Monk.

Comfortably, as in its natural element, a camera swims coolly in the moltitude of the crown. It stares at an urban 70's America. An insistent melody in slow-motion gives a melancholic aspect to the show of these passers-by crossed and lost, the human crown of the time. (Cyril Hurel)

A re-creation for film of Meredith Monk's seminal dance/theater work incorporating film and original music, voice, guitar, and audiotapes. Originally performed in 1966, Judson Memorial Church, New York.