A fragmentary but highly engaging documentary portrait of Meredith Monk, a trailblazing icon of New York City’s experimental arts and music scene.

Meredith Monk, a composer, performer and interdisciplinary artist, is one of the great artistic pioneers of our time. With Monk’s music at its centre, and featuring interviews with Björk and David Byrne, Monk in Pieces is a mosaic that mirrors the structure of Monk’s own work, and illuminates her wildly original vocabulary of sound and imagery.
As a female artist in the male-dominated down-town arts scene of the 1960s and ‘70s, Monk had to fight for recognition and resources. Early reviews in the New York Times were vicious and sexist, e.g. “A disgrace to dancing,” and “so earnestly strange in a talented little-girl way”. Yet as her celebrated contemporary Philip Glass says, “she, among all of us, was – and still is – the uniquely gifted one.”
In the film’s final chapters, Monk faces her mortality. We see her warily entrust her masterpiece, ATLAS, to the director Yuval Sharon and the singer Joanna Lynn-Jacobs for a new production at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. For 60 years, Monk has directed and performed in all of her music theatre works; now she must learn to let go. What will happen to such a singular work after she is gone?