Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – Meredith Monk’s CELLULAR SONGS at BAM is equally beguiling and confounding

• By drediman
• March 14, 2018
• No Comments

Meredith Monk and company in “Cellular Songs” at BAM Harvey.

Tonight, I caught the opening night performance of Meredith Monk’s Cellular Songs at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. BAM has long been a hotbed for avant-garde music- and theater-making, and Ms. Monk over the years has been a strong contributor to that tradition. Many of these musicians, like Philip Glass and John Adams (Einstein on the Beach and Nixon in China, both seminal 20th century operas, played pivotal performances at BAM) have since crossed over from the eccentric fringe to mainstream recognition and success. I’m happy to report that Ms. Monk remains as idiosyncratic, confounding, and beguiling as ever.

Her latest multimedia piece, Cellular Songs, is a meditation on that most minuscule of life units – you got it, the cell. Like life itself, Ms. Monk’s songs, chirpy and soothing in equal measure, develop slowly and organically, and sometimes surprisingly. She’s supported primarily by her longtime ensemble of four women vocalists. There’s an instinctive symbiosis in the way their voices weave within and against each other, as if building to some unknown but inevitable conclusion, or new beginning. Indeed, the ending sequence – one in which cellular division is depicted – caught me off guard. It was an understated, utterly beautiful theatrical coup. Indeed, the gentle final tableau provoked me to contemplate, all over again, upon this thing we call (biological) existence.

RECOMMENDED

CELLULAR SONGS
Music/Performance
BAM Harvey Theater
1 hour, 15 minutes (without an intermission)
Through March 17