Meredith Monk Quotes

I have never met a person in whom I did not see myself reflected.

I like connecting with people, and that's what good art is: a point of connection. There's nothing better, on stage or on film.

The prime goal of an author is the same as a musician, which is to emotionally connect with the reader in some way or another.

Art is essentially communication. It doesn't exist in a vacuum. That's why people make art, so other people can relate to it.

You want people - I want people to relate to me as a character. I want them to go, 'That could have been me,' or, 'I know someone like that.'

When an audience comes to one of my concerts, I hope they'll see themselves, somewhere, in one of the songs.

I want the poem to be an experience - for both the listener and for myself.

When we watch dance, the artists and the audience are part of a momentary collective experience that will never happen again.

I consider each performance to be an intimate conversation between me and the audience members.

Every artist wants his or her work to connect with someone. I think that's why people make art.

I love trying to forge a contract between creator and audience in which we are able to meet halfway, each injecting a part of our own experiences into a story that's being told.

Singers always have an advantage. You know, everyone can connect to a song in a way that they cannot do to a basketball act or a magician act or whatever.

People make songs so that somebody else will hear them and want to do them. I guess it's an indication that the songs aren't so ultra-personal that they can't possibly be interpreted by anyone else.

The music is really about sharing an experience. That's why we call it Stay Human. It's like we're sharing this genuine human exchange.

When you play a gig in Poland or Australia, or you play a gig in Toledo, they all clap at the same parts of the show. They're clapping for the solos in the exact same way.

We're alone, but we are capable of communicating to one another both our loneliness and our desire to break through it. You say, 'I'm alone.' Someone answers, 'I'm alone too.' There's a shift in the scale of power. A bridge is thrown between the two abysses.

Through art, mysterious bonds of understanding and of knowledge are established among men. They are the bonds of a great Brotherhood. Those who are of the Brotherhood know each other, and time and space cannot separate them.

One common calamity makes men extremely affect each other, though they differ in every other particular

There is a stage with people we love when we are no longer separate from them, but so close in sympathy that we live through them as directly as through ourselves. ... we push back our hair because theirs is in their eyes.

A man who strains himself on the stage is bound, if he is any good, to strain all the people sitting in the stalls.

The last page of [Lincoln in the Bardo] - without giving too much away - involves somebody entering somebody else. Not in a sexual way. But it says one of the simplest things you could ever say, which is that we must try and be inside each other. We must have some kind of feeling for each other and enter into each other's experience.

My conception of the audience is of a public each member of which is carrying about with him what he thinks is an anxiety, or a hope, or a preoccupation which is his alone and isolates him from mankind and in this respect at least the function of a play is to reveal him to himself so that he may touch others by virtue of the revelation of his mutuality with them. If only for this reason I regard the theater as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone.

Things that feel super personal actually feel really universal. It's sort of the more you really identify something specific within yourself, the more people connect to it because ultimately we are all connected in some way.

I love theater. I think theater, when its done right, is the best, like a religious experience. When it is done badly, it's the worst thing. It's just an incredible experience.

The world only makes sense to me given my life and my background if, in fact, we're not just an assortment of tribes that can never understand each other, but that we're, rather, one common humanity that can meet and learn and love each other.