[dance-tech] Screendance Conference/Meredith Monk

Dear Friends,
I am happy to announce that our special guest for Screendance: The State of the 
Art 2, Curating the Practice/Curating as Practice at the American Dance 
Festival July 10-13, will be the renowned artist, Meredith Monk.  I will have 
the honor of interviewing her in person and moderating a discussion with Ms. 
Monk about her work in Dance and Film.  We will also be screening her 1981 
film, Ellis Island, a truly stunning work combining performance, history and 
dance to create a most memorable exploration of site.  The exact date and time 
will be announced shortly, but the event will take place during the conference. 
 For registration, please see:  
http://www.americandancefestival.org/projects/screenDance.html.  Also, there is 
still time to submit a proposal for a talk and/or a curated program.  We hope 
to have as many voices and points of view represented as possible.
Looking forward to seeing you at the conference.
Very best,
Douglas Rosenberg


SCREENDANCE: STATE OF THE ART 2 
CURATING THE PRACTICE/CURATING AS PRACTICE 



July 10 – 13, 2008
 at the American Dance Festival
, Duke University, 
Durham, North Carolina

ANNOUNCES AN INTIMATE DISCUSSION WITH
MEREDITH MONK
(date and time TBA)

Preceeded by a Screening of Monk’s influential 1981 film, Ellis Island *

The American Dance Festival is pleased to announce An Intimate Discussion about 
dance and the moving image with Meredith Monk as part of Screendance: The State 
of the Art 2, Curating the Practice/Curating as Practice. 

The discussion will be moderated by Douglas Rosenberg and is a rare opportunity 
to hear renowned interdisciplinary artist Meredith Monk speak about her 
pioneering work in film from her earliest works made in the mid 1960’s through 
the haunting and elegant later films including Ellis Island and Book of Days.  

The event will be preceeded by a rare screening of Monk’s award winning and 
genre-bending 1981 film, Ellis Island.

Monk’s groundbreaking work in film is visually rich and deeply moving as it 
addresses issues of loss, displacement and community through starkly wrought 
metaphorical tableaus.

About Ellis Island, (courtesy Video Data Bank)

Between 1892 and 1927, almost 16 million people came to Ellis Island attempting 
to immigrate to the United States. For the 280,000 who were turned back, Ellis 
Island become the "Isle of Tears." Meredith Monk and Bob Rosen chose this site 
as the setting for a historical/psychological ghost story about our ancestors. 
Ellis Island blends documentary, experimental, fiction and dance modes in what 
Monk describes as "a mosaic of sounds and images woven together into formal 
musical design." Tableaux vivants and a photo-documentary stillness collapse 
the passing of time in haunting scenes of immigrants and their families moving 
through the clinics, classrooms, and waiting rooms that make up this landscape 
of memory, pain, and hope.

"Though it is inspired by historical fact, the work is not a documentary. 
Though it uses professional actors, it has no dialogue and no storyline in the 
ordinary sense. It does, however, try to suggest something of the atmosphere 
and mystery of a ghost story, the ghosts in this case being our ancestors." 
—Meredith Monk and Bob Rosen (San Francisco International Video Festival, 1982)


Meredith Monk is a composer, singer, director/choreographer and creator of new 
opera, music theater works, films and installations. A pioneer in what is now 
called “extended vocal technique” and “interdisciplinary performance,” Monk 
creates works that thrive at the intersection of music and movement, image and 
object, light and sound in an effort to discover and weave together new modes 
of perception.
Monk is a pioneer in site-specific performance, creating works such as Juice: A 
Theater Cantata In 3 Installments (1969) and American Archeology #1: Roosevelt 
Island (1994). She is also an accomplished filmmaker who has made a series of 
award-winning films including Ellis Island (1981) and her first feature, Book 
Of Days (1988), which was aired on PBS, shown at the New York Film Festival and 
selected for the Whitney Museum’s Biennial. Both films were released on DVD in 
February 2007. A retrospective art exhibition, Meredith Monk: Archeology of an 
Artist, opened at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at 
Lincoln Center in 1996. Other recent art exhibits are comprised of a major 
installation, Art Performs Life at The Walker Art Center, a show, Shrines at 
the Frederieke Taylor / TZ’ Art Gallery, inclusion in the 2002 Biennial at the 
Whitney Museum, ev+a 2002 Exhibition at Limerick City Gallery of Art and group 
exhibits Show People at Exit Art and Between Thought 
and Sound: Graphic Notation in Contemporary Music at The Kitchen. A monograph, 
Meredith Monk, edited by Deborah Jowitt was released by Johns Hopkins Press in 
1997.

*ELLIS ISLAND 
(1981) 
Directed by Meredith Monk
Produced and Co-Directed by Bob Rosen
Cinematography by Jerry Pantzer
Music by Meredith Monk
  
"An intensely memorable film evocation of America's immigrants, set in the 
crumbling halls of contemporary Ellis Island...spare, sober, and exquisite, it 
recalls the formality and beauty of vintage photos." (Village Voice) 
  
A film about the experiences of immigrants entering America at the turn of the 
century, Ellis Island was one of the last films shot on location before Ellis 
Island was restored.  Neither documentary, nor fiction, Monk describes the 
non-verbal Ellis Island as a “ghost story told through the musicality of 
images.”  The film was awarded the CINE Golden Eagle, Special Jury Prizes from 
the Atlanta and San Francisco Film and Video Festivals, and has been shown by 
PBS-USA, Channel Four-London, and ZDF-West Germany. 
- - - - -
Black & White and Color, Sound, 28 minutes

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