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