Meredith Monk could be the 21st century's answer to St Hildegard of Bingen. The legendary composer, singer, film-maker, performance artist and choreographer is standing outside her apartment, on West Broadway, near the smouldering remains of the World Trade Centre. The fact that in Monk's vocabulary, "ground zero" is a place she likes to start from in creative terms makes the experience that bit more surreal.
The artist whose work has titles such as Recent Ruins, New York Requiem, American Archaeology and Quarry points out a rising cloud of smoke a few blocks south. "See there, between those two buildings, where the smoke is? That's where it used to be."
Everyone is consoling each other in New York, and Monk is no exception. Despite the burning sensation at the back of my throat, Monk's neighbour, who owns the Bubble Lounge, proclaims the air back to normal.
"I'm a singer," says Monk. "I can't breathe in that air." In Franklin Station Cafe, looking neat and inconspicuous in her navy jacket and two trademark plaits, Monk is welcomed home. She orders a hot cider and says that, since her return from New Mexico, in the early hours of that morning, she has been listening to Dolores Keane for comfort.
A fourth-generation singer, Monk's Russian great-grandfather was a cantor, her grandparents founded the Harlem Music School and her mother was a popular singer. "I use my own voice and body as a source, but it is just part of a bigger thing," she says. "It transcends country, culture, nationality; and goes to the heart of just being. The heart of existence."
Despite, or perhaps because of, the tradition behind her, Monk has always been way ahead of the pack. Some 35 years ago, she pioneered the use of multimedia performance with 16 Millimeter Earrings, her astonishing solo piece for the Judson Church collective. It involved films of Monk projected on to herself, and audio excerpts from Wilhelm Reich's The Function Of The Orgasm. This technically audacious "rite of passage for a young woman" had "four 16mm projectors five tape recorders, and we were mixing live. It was definitely backyard technology".
Those were the days when, "trying to be a badass", she fictionalised her identity, claiming to be "Inca-Jewish". She performed in the "establishment" Billy Rose Theatre on Broadway: "I wanted to subvert the situation in every way I could."
Her Leopold Bloom-style, as-the-mind-sees-it perception can be linked to her own visual defect. In 16 Millimeter Earrings, she highlighted her double vision by projecting her eyes distorted through magnifying glass. When her mother sent her to eurhythmics classes as a child, her "problem" was on its way to becoming a ground-breaker for the performance world, through which she offered us new ways of looking at the world.
Continually forging new ways of putting art forms together, she has gone through many artistic phases. "Every piece is a journey into the unknown. I think that's really important in our world, because everybody wants to know what something is going to be before it's done. The business world people want to know how long is it going to be, what's the name of it, and what's your tech requirement two years in advance," she says.
Somehow, Monk has resisted such trends. "What is really beautiful about making art is not giving in to that at all. And sometimes in that process, making it incredibly uncomfortable by allowing yourself to hang out in the unknown. And you really don't know. You have some clues and you keep following them; it's a very intuitive thing. Discovery is what, to me, makes everything worthwhile - as opposed to being a product-maker."
Still, Monk's quirky purity is filtering through people such as Laurie Anderson and Robert Wilson and through films such as the Coen brothers' The Big Lebowski, Jean-Luc Godard's Nouvelle Vague and David Byrne's True Stories. Her music is also readily available now, on the ECM label.
Her "sense of deep spatial organisation" and enduring penchant for non-proscenium performance spaces was prophetic. With The House, her interdisciplinary foundation from 1968, came Juice: A Theatre Cantata, a perambulatory site-specific work from 1969. A woman riding a horse down Fifth Avenue was a preamble to 85 singers with Jew's harps along the spiralling ramps of the Guggenheim Museum. The next instalment took place three weeks later in a theatre, and the final section happened in The House Loft (Monk's apartment doubles as a work and performance space).
1971 Vessel: An Opera Epic, a piece about Joan of Arc with excerpts from George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan, began in her loft, moved by bus to The Performing Garage and concluded in the car-park.
Performances that are "experiential for the audience" follow through to Mercy, her latest large-scale multimedia piece. This collaboration with Ann Hamilton, the visual artist, who is coming to IMMA next year, toys with conventional proxemics - or the spaces between peoples - to create a human surround-sound effect.
No matter how much people want to label her a choreographer, she resists. "I feel my movement is about a much more primal idea of the body. I feel I am going way before there was such a thing as choreography. Going much more for an organic, primal idea of the body, and then where that leads in space," she says. "The material itself really tells you what it wants. Each piece is a different world. You open the door to that world and let it tell you what it needs and what the laws of that world are." Her process of making a piece "is also discovering a form. I don't have a formula for it" .
In 1978, Monk formed Vocal Ensemble to focus on her extraordinary vocal technique. At the core of her art is working her singers as a jazz ensemble, bringing musical phrases she has written for them to play around with. She solicits their contributions and reworks the material on her own before they refine it again together.
Wary of words, she aims to speak directly to the heart, with scores made up of nonsensical words. She says the voice can "do almost anything that electronics can", and her singing has been described as "a folk singer crossed with a baby bird" or, sometimes, an ambulance.
For Monk, the purest form of her work is the solo concert: "You can see everything that I have to say in the most essential form, like a seed that everything is in. You can fly as a soloist in a different way than you can with other people." Listen out for the famous "duets for one voice" in her solo concert in Dublin next week. She says she will sing raw new work, along with excerpts from her oeuvre since 1973, alighting on Songs From The Hill, from 1976, inspired by the desert landscape of New Mexico; Light Songs, from 1988; Choosing Companions from Atlas, her 1991 opera; and the lovely Gotham Lullaby, from 1975, which Bj÷rk has also recorded.
Michael Tilson Thomas of the New World Symphony has commissioned Chances & Dances, her first composition for a full orchestra. With instrumentalists who, to her delight, are "really open", Monk is treating instruments as voices to develop "singing" and "dancing" sections.
"Thinking about this event here September 11th, and a lot of people putting shrines, pictures and offerings all over New York", it occurs to her that she might ask the participants in her Dublin workshop, Singing Body, Dancing Voice, to make their own shrines. A Buddhist for many years, she performed for the Dalai Lama in 1999, and shrines have figured in her work for a decade.
After a long association with The House, John Scott, the artistic director of Irish Modern Dance Theatre, is giddy at the prospect of the way Monk's mini residency, which he organised, might "enhance and inspire interdisciplinary work in Ireland".
Her visit includes a rare chance to see films such as Ellis Island, from 1981, and the apocalyptic Book Of Days, from 1988, which oscillates between New York and medieval Europe. Both are being screened at the Irish Film Centre at the weekend.
Monk wants her concert-goers to know that "it's OK to laugh. Have a good time". Refreshingly, her quirky sense of humour endures - she might even throw in a Mary O'Hara song for good measure.
Meredith Monk is at SFX City Theatre, Dublin, on Tuesday, October 30th. She is also hosting workshops at the Samuel Beckett Centre, Trinity College, this weekend, and giving a talk on Wednesday, October 31st, at the Contemporary Music Centre, as part of the Critical Voices programme. Bookings: 01-8749619
