Meredith Monk in Education of the Girlchild (1972).
The iconoclastic performer and artist, Meredith Monk, who challenged notions of musical composition and discipline-specificity when she first emerged in the late 1960s, is making a retrospective glance in “Education of the Girlchild Revisited,” a “reconfiguration” of her 1973 work “Education of a Girlchild, an opera.” This work, performed as a solo by the artist, is itself a look backwards through the life of an aged woman to her childhood. In recent years, the 68 year-old artist has spent a lot of time considering the backward reflection that age and mortality provoke. In 2006 she created “Impermanence,” a multi-disciplinary work that incorporated passages from the diary of her then recently deceased partner of many years. Monk has said of this time, "There was something raw in my musical response; it puts your entire life in perspective." At the beginning of the process for “Impermanence,” Monk worked with a group of hospice patients. She observed that what was important to them at this significant moment of the end of their lives was the dependability of their old habits.
