At the Site of Wilderness: Meredith Monk’s Facing North (1990)

Abstract

In 1990, American composer, vocalist, filmmaker and choreographer Meredith Monk became witness to the condition of wilderness while in residency at the Banff Centre in northern Alberta, Canada. The resulting work, Facing North, a collaboration with long-time associate composer Robert Een, grew out of the combined senses of physical and metaphysical isolation engendered by the remote mid-winter setting and Monk’s detachment from her normal, urban life. The piece (and accompanying tone poem later recorded and released in album form in 1992) portrays the interdependence of two people trying to come to terms with their simultaneous being and nonbeing, connection and disconnection, in what Monk perceived as an inimical northern landscape. In “Picture and Witness at the Site of the Wilderness” (2000) Canadian cultural theorist Jonathan Bordo argues that artists and their paintings of wilderness arise “from the very idea of wilderness as positing and effacing a witness to an unwitnessible condition” (Bordo 2000: 228). Such depictions of wilderness, while representing a perceived denial or erasure of human presence, in fact require a witness to affirm the very condition of wilderness. In this paper I argue that in performing wilderness Monk engages in a similar process to the visual artists painting wilderness that Bordo examines. As part of an on-going research project entitled “Choreographing the North” this paper focuses on the rupture that is enacted when trying to represent absence through presence and how this relates to ideas of collecting and colonizing the North. In Facing North Monk performs the mythopoetic divide between cultured Self and untamed Other, realizing in the process that her presence in the wilderness, while resonant, is ultimately self-referential.