Venezia, 20 Oct, (askanews) – Her voice and her performances have become legendary and make her one of the most influential artists, in the musical field, but also in the world of performance. Meredith Monk, born in New York in 1942, he received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2025 Biennale Musica. Director Caterina Barbieri presented her like this: “Her work stands out for the multidisciplinary approach and the pioneering use of extended vocal techniques that have expanded the potential of the human voice, transforming it into an unprecedented vehicle for musical and theatrical exploration. Her works explore a multidimensionality that dissolves the boundaries between the arts by combining music, theatre, dance and cinema”.
In his Venetian concert at the Malibran Theater Monk once again showed the vastness and originality of both his practice and his repertoireas well as the incredible way of understanding the very idea of music and singing. The Biennale also features a video installation of his that takes the viewer into a different, hypnotic and moving dimension. And from the stage of Ca’ Giustinian Meredith Monk remembered his Venetian debut. “When I came here for the first time in 1975, invited by the Biennale – she said – we performed ‘Education of the Girlchild’ at the Cantieri Navali alla Giudecca. Nobody knew who we were. But after the first performance the great Luca Ronconi, who was the artistic director of the Biennale, came backstage and with tears in his eyes asked us to stay and do shows for another week. I had never happened before, and it changed my life.”
According to the curator Andrea Lissoni the most radical tool of Meredith Monk’s art is the relationship, with the public being absorbed into the “permeable environments” created by the “expanded body of performance”. A body that comes to life on stage, but also within us, accompanied by the shape of the American artist’s voice.
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