Meredith Monk @ Next Wave Festival

On Saturday, my fiancee and I went to the Brooklyn Academy of Music to see — maybe “witness” would be a better word for the experience — Meredith Monk’s Songs of Ascension. It was one of the most deeply, indescribably moving live performances of my life, so I am now, foolhardy music writer that I am, going to fumble around attempting to describe it. Prepare for some truly ridiculous metaphors.

The performance was a premiere of sorts — the music at the work’s core had been performed once or twice before, in a couple different iterations, as Monk has worked out the kinks. But the production we saw was brand-new, featuring videos by Ann Hamilton and choreography by Monk that was tailored to suit BAM’s Harvey Theater. When we walked in there was already a woman dancing onstage, completely alone. The lights were already halfway down. The presence of a performer onstage imposed a strange hush on us as we filed in; it felt like walking late into a church service. Then, the lights dimmed further and Monk — oddly girlish and elfin even in her late 60s — ambled onstage with the other members of her dance troupe.

Monk’s performances are communal affairs, part chanting, part dancing, part string quartet, part devotional. As I whispered to Stacy halfway through, watching the performers as they danced together, chanted at each other, laid down on their backs, and then sat Indian-style in groups of twos and threes, I felt a little like I was observing a hyper-evolved race of enlightened beings attend kindergarten. Such is the indescribable mix of childlike abandonment and deep wisdom Monk conjures. Her famous vocalizing, a wide-ranging assortment of ululations, chants, whoops, and yodels, evokes the delighted babbling of an infant child just discovering how to make joyful noises. Her movements communicate this same innocent wonder — I have a body! and when I move my arm, it does this! — but absolutely nothing about Songs of Ascension feels naive or infantile. Indeed, Ascension is a profoundly spiritual piece, a 90-minute meditation on the act of meditation.

The title hints at the work’s inspiration; as Monk has said in multiple interviews, she was intrigued by the idea that all religions have the notion of ascent built into their DNA. Worshippers always travel upwards, not downwards, when making a pilgrimage of some sort — up a mountain, up Jacob’s ladder, up a Buddhist stupa. Why up, and not down? (”Because Hell’s down there” is not an acceptable answer, btw.) Also, why is this notion of ascent so often interwoven with the idea of a spiral? Monk took these two ideas — the ascent, and the spiral — and wound her music around them again and again and again. Themes returned, but they didn’t feel like the sort of formal variations your Music Theory professor taught you to listen for — they felt like life cycles, freshly strange and important every time they reared their head.

Ann Hamilton’s videos, in turn, were spectral, ghostly things, inkblot images of swans taking flight, or bare trees, or a rider on horseback, and they screened on turntables, so that they spun slowly around the theater’s bare walls throughout the performance. The work culminated in two melody lines, both moving inexorably in opposite directions — one four-note motif spiralling endlessly downward while another traced a never-ending arc up toward the sky. The theme literally ascended to the rafters, as a choir suddenly appeared in the balcony, singing back down at us from all sides. The Harvey Theater began reverberating with the sound, and I felt the sort of goosebumps raise on my forearms that you don’t experience unless you are in the presence of some truly fearless honesty.