Ru
EnV. Kiseyev
Elements of a ritual in a performance “The Book оf Days” by Meredith Monk
Performance as an art form plays a predominant role in the Meredith Monk’s career. She was one of the pioneers of the performative movement in the United States at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries and became not only one of the brightest representatives of musical and theatrical performance art, but also contributed to its active development and introduction into various genres of musical theater. In the form of a performance the author created her best art works, which made her one of the most influential composers in North America. The aesthetic principles of Meredith Monk were formed during the heyday of conceptual art, and under its direct influence the process of convergence of academic theater and contemporary art practices took place. Due to that fact new term “conceptual theatre” has been established in the American artistic environment, which replaced the traditional form of stage performance with the demonstration of author’s experience of reality, whether it be a sense of a real period of time, or a perception of space at the moment.
The article examines the elements of ritual in the musical and theatrical performance “The Book of Days” by Meredith Monk. The author focuses on the space-time continuum of the work, which evokes associations with ritual. As a result of analytical observations of the perception of the artistic time and space in the “Book of Days”, the author comes to the conclusion that their conceptualization and immersion in the atmosphere of an imaginary ritual contribute to uniting the audience into a community and create a liminal situation.
Key words
the genre of performance, conceptual theatre, “The Book of Days”, performativeness in the work of Meredith Monk, ritual, artistic time and space.
For citation
Kiseyev V. Elements of a ritual in a performance “The Book Of Days” by Meredith Monk // South-Russian Musical Anthology. 2021. No. 3. Pp. 18–23.
