Meredith Monk + John Antrobus

Composer and performance artist Meredith Monk has kept a dream diary since she first started performing in the 1960s. With the help of neuropsychologist John Antrobus she reaches back into her past visions to see if she can trace a creative line from her dreams to her work.
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. She has alternately been proclaimed as a “magician of the voice” and “one of America’s coolest composers.” Monk is the recipient of numerous awards including the MacArthur “Genius” Award in 1995. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and named a United States Artists Fellow in 2006. This past year she was also awarded a Letter of Distinction from the American Music Center. Monk holds honorary Doctor of Arts degrees from Bard College, the University of the Arts, the Juilliard School, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the Boston Conservatory. This is her third appearance at the Rubin Museum.
John Antrobus is Emeritus Head of the City University Ph.D. Program in Cognitive Neuroscience, located at the City College. Together with his many students and colleagues who were willing to endure demanding all night shifts in the sleep lab he has published many research papers and co-edited several books on dreaming sleep, including two editions of The Mind in Sleep. He has helped to move the study of both dreaming and daydreaming – non-perceptual, “off-line” processes into the fields of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience. But he notes that the neuroscience of dreaming is still in its infancy.Antrobus authored Cognition and Affect and served as co-editor for The Neuropsychology of Sleep and Dreaming.

An extract from Meredith Monk’s Dream Journal.