American Archaeology # 1.

Meredith Monk Lighthouse Park and Renwick Ruins, Roosevelt Island September 23-25,1994 Reviewed by Nancy Dalva

It wasn't the rain. Although those who attended Meredith Monk's American Archaeology #1: Roosevelt Island on pleasant evenings doubtless had a more comfortable experience than those of us who saw this historical pageant while getting wet, the work's weaknesses were inherent.

These included a lack of cohesion; a certain fuzziness of viewpoint (for instance, we saw, at the same time, actors portraying historical figures, "real" people cast as theatricalized versions of themselves, and disabled men and women without apparent roles); occasional ludicrousness (such as a horse and rider engaging in some tame dressage involving fake corn stalks, and an archaeologist digging with what looked like a big kitchen spoon); and dumb anachronisms that blurred temporal distinctions among the performers.

The piece had two parts, one taking place at the northern end of Roosevelt Island, the other at its southern extreme. Both involved a varied cast which included Monk's Vocal Ensemble, and both unfolded as a series of overlapping vignettes. Both ended when Monk herself sang. (The act ain't over 'til the thin lady sings.) The whole affair was intended as an evocation of the little island's history, which dates from the days of the Leni-Lenape peoples and includes plenty of guilt-inducing episodes relating to its long service as a convenient place for housing the chronically ill, grievously handicapped, and mentally unstable. (Out of sight, out of mind.) What Monk actually revealed was how ravishing it can be to employ the world as a backdrop--as when a passing tugboat and its tanker loomed up beyond a field of green grass. It is always good to be reminded of the serendipitous mundane.

Nonetheless, Monk's work--already vaporous, juxtapositional, and full of strange and wondrous sights and sounds when it is indoors--does not expand in the great outdoors. It disappears. A theater, a stage, a proscenium, do not diminish either her expression or our experience--far from it. Instead, they provide compression, and welcome containment.

For some, the island adventure may have been exhilarating, if vague. As a sort of son et lumiere (and pluie) it did have its moments. These occurred at the great, ghostly Renwick Ruins, probably because this burnt-out shell is already theatrical. It was here that Monk set a gorgeous and telling medieval funeral procession, complete with a towering skeleton. This had very little to do with Roosevelt Island, which may be why it was so affecting and effective. The past is indeed our distant mirror, and Monk is plenty archaeological--she is even site-specific--but she is excavating a collective unconscious, and her site is her own mind. She doesn't need weather.