Monk in Pieces

MONK IN PIECES, documentary by Billy Shebar, USA/FRA/DEU 2025, 90 minutes





Meredith Monk is one of the great artists of our time, a pioneer as a composer, singer, choreographer, performance and dance artist in equal measure. She comes from a family of musicians with a Russian-Polish background, studied music, theater and dance before moving to New York in the 1960s and was inspired by artists such as Charlotte Moorman and composers such as John Cage to develop her very own vocal art. Starting out with solo vocal performances, Meredith Monk became one of the most influential artists of our time.





"With Monk's music at the 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, "of us all, she was and still is the one with a unique talent".





In the final chapters of the movie, Monk faces 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?"


(realfiction)