The drill hall at the Park Avenue Armory can feel gloomy and imposing but in Indra’s Net, the latest full-length work from Meredith Monk, that emptiness transforms into something patient and open-handed, offering space as a gift to an otherwise cramped city and pressurized population.
Monk’s title comes from a Buddhist metaphor. A wise god-king stretches an infinite net over the universe and sets a jewel at every point of intersection. Each of the glittering jewels is infinitely faceted, reflecting every other jewel and the net. The metaphor explains the interconnectedness of all life, of all phenomena, in all worlds and universes, along with the sublime emptiness in between every point and line of the next. This void is not the sadness of lack, but the release of self, the quiet stillness of presence.
Monk’s piece, which had its world premiere last year at the Holland Festival in Amsterdam and had its North American premiere here, is the result of well over a decade of thinking by the artist. It is part performance and part art installation, but it also feels like a ritual or a meditation. In the Armory, the spaces between—between ceiling and stage, between actors and audience—feel as crucial as the points of intersection.
It is tempting, without seeing it, to boil Indra’s Net down to a cliché: everything is connected. But to do so would capture only a sliver of its ethical impulse and none of its beauty. In such a cynical age, it feels rare to encounter a work where generosity and vulnerability are the ruling principles. It’s even rarer for that work to enact those principles instead of declaiming them. In Indra’s Net, Monk’s priorities are inscribed into the voice, enlivened by the body, and suffused through the instruments. There is no plot and no text, only shifting configurations of voice and instruments, intersecting and stretching out in all directions. What results is an invitation, an opening to feel oneself as part of something larger and then to let go.
Monk’s Vocal Ensemble consists of sixteen singers—including herself—eight of whom take on the majority of the music. The other eight singers, dressed in black in contrast with the all-white looks of the primary ensemble, act as witnesses and or perhaps shadow selves. Throughout, an ensemble of strings, wind, brass, harp and percussion frames, comments upon and eventually merges with the voices. Monk’s writing for both singers and orchestra is winsome, mysterious, and unapologetically beautiful. It may seem simple, but underneath it is intricately constructed, clearly the result of hours of collective dedication. The singers are uniformly excellent, but they have powerfully individual timbres—the voices are not preternaturally polished but visceral and human.
Monk, now eighty and entering her sixth decade as a performing artist, moves with a steady grace and energy. Her voice is still hearty but has acquired a small quiver with age. This makes it only more beautiful. It stands as a reminder of how fleeting and fragile the voice is, as well as how powerful.
Monk is known for her use of extended vocal techniques, but somehow that word feels inadequate to what she actually does with the voice. She doesn’t just extend past what you hear in more traditional music theater, she excavates fragments of vocality that get buried in other genres and uses them to construct new worlds. These sounds feel ancient: not an extension past but a return to the voice’s bodily business and mythic power. Wordless phonemes, hums, zips, tooth-clicks, tongue-clucks, groans, sighs, hocks, nasal buzzes and indeed, quite a lot of beautiful singing appear in Indra’s Net. At times, the voices seem to have lively, wordless discussions.
Elsewhere, phonemes pass seamlessly from one singer to another, as if from a single voice refracted outward. One movement saw individual voices set in duets with a solo instrument, braiding them together in complex patterns. Another involved a teeth-clicking chorus, which gave way to a percussion battle as the two percussionists came forward to join the singers. There’s a soft humor to this and other movements and a sense of play that feels hallowed as well as mischievous. But large swaths of Indra’s Net flood the hall with tender awe, layering pattern on pattern until it swells and crashes like a wave.
Movement and vision are crucial to Monk’s exploration; the Ensemble members reconfigure their bodies, individually and together, into shifting shapes. A circular stage and circular screen display projections designed by Jorge Morales Picó—black tree branches that crackle over the singers, shocking red patterns of bark, or a small silent film of a volcano seen from the air—or projections of a bird’s eye view of the stage, where the intricacy of Monk’s direction becomes doubly-visible. Joe Levasseur’s lighting is essential here, washing the stage in vivid blues, warm whites, and a faint blush pink that recalls the dawn. One gorgeous vignette had the ensemble spread out across the circle. As they stood stationary, Levasseur’s lighting turned each into the dial of a clock; their doubled shadows appeared as the hands. Opposites abound: dark and light, presence and absence.
Time unfolds strangely in Indra’s Net, or rather, it seems not to unfold at all but to lose all relevance. It is challenging to put Indra’s Net into words—after all, Monk herself doesn’t need them—but I’m reminded of a snippet from Edward Snow’s translation of Rilke: “Singing is being. Easy, for a god. But for us, when are we?” Monk’s work offers an answer: now.
