Quarry

A haunting, experimental stage work that blurs music, movement, and film into a dreamlike meditation on illness and tyranny.

Directed by

Amram Nowak, Meredith Monk

Genres

Music, Drama

Starring

Meredith Monk, Ping Chong, Steve Clorfeine

Overview

Monk’s meditation on WWII and recurring cycles of intolerance, fascism, and cruelty in history originated in 1976 as a live stage work utilizing elements of music, images, movement, dialogue, film, sound, and light. This film version, shot on 16mm in the Lepercq Space at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1977, was created in partnership with the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts as part of their initiative to document ground-breaking live performance for future restaging. QUARRY centers on a sick American child (played by Monk herself) whose world darkens as her illness progresses, this darkening including the rise of a dictator. A unique document of this innovative, boundary-blurring production, and a work of art on its own terms, replete with a film-within-a-film directed by Monk in 1975.

How it feels

Dark, bleak, eerie and melancholic. Slow-burning and demanding.

About

Death, power, corruption, isolation

Content

Mild violence and language. No gore or sexual content.

Note

Written by AI, so it can be wrong. Full breakdown

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