March 30, 2004
Contact: George Yatchisin
(805) 893-3494
e-mail: yatchisin-g@ sa.ucsb.edu

Creative geniuses Meredith Monk and Pico Iyer
meet In Conversation at UCSB Campbell Hall

Summary Facts:

• Meredith Monk and Pico Iyer
• A wide-ranging conversation about home, creativity and the global soul
• Monk is a groundbreaking composer, singer, dancer and choreographer
• Iyer is an acclaimed writer and was named one of Utne Reader’s “100 visionaries who could change your life”
• Monk is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow in UCSB’s College of Creative Studies
• Wednesday, May 5
• 8 pm / UCSB Campbell Hall
• General public $10 / UCSB students $8
• Tickets/Information: UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535

Meredith Monk and Pico Iyer will meet In Conversation on Wednesday, May 5 at 8 pm at UCSB Campbell Hall. MacArthur “Genius” Award winner Meredith Monk has forged a singularly wide-ranging career as a composer, singer, dancer and director. Monk will discuss ideas of home, the other, creativity and the global soul in a provocative conversation with acclaimed writer and beloved part-time Santa Barbara resident Pico Iyer. Monk is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow in the College of Creative Studies.

According to Pico Iyer, the conversation should be stimulating and expansive. He has promised that they will discuss “the mixing of old forms and new, our shared interest in travel as a way of asking questions about both home and the other, our attempt to go back to the old, the ancestral, to seek out roots as a way to sharpen and better understand our lives in the middle of the very new; and our search for some universal component, some global voice or soul, that anchors and unites us in the middle of all today’s fragmentations. Both Meredith and I go on long retreats, often, even as we spend much of the rest of our time traveling; and both have been trying to seek out something shared and ancient, which underlies the Technicolor world we move through. I imagine our conversation is going to roam across art, meditation, the old, the universal, and how we ground and steady ourselves in a world turning ever more quickly.”

During a career that spans more than 35 years, Meredith Monk has been acclaimed by audiences and critics as a major creative force in the performing arts, working as a composer, singer, director/choreographer and creator of new opera, musical theater works, films and installations. Her many awards across artistic fields include a first prize at the Venice Biennale, three Obies, a CINE Golden Eagle, and two German Critics Prizes for Best Record of the Year. 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. Her groundbreaking exploration of the voice as an instrument, as an eloquent language in and of itself, expands the boundaries of musical composition, creating landscapes of sound that unearth feelings, energies and memories for which we have no words.

Mercy, Monk’s recent artistic collaboration with formerly Santa Barbara-based conceptual artist Ann Hamilton was hailed as an “intensely moving, drop-dead gorgeous, can’t-be-categorized fluid piece of meditative music, movement and milieu presenting an immersion into the process of transcendence” by the Los Angeles Times.

Pico Iyer, a part-time Santa Barbara resident, is the author of eight books including Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls and the Search for Home, Video Night in Kathmandu and The Lady and the Monk. Salon.com has insisted “with extraordinary empathy and insight, Iyer shows how cultures collide...how a dance of dreams and desires and preconceptions ensues every time a visitor and a local meet.” In 1995 the Utne Reader named Pico Iyer one of the 100 “writers who could change your life.”

Pico Iyer describes himself as a “global village on two legs.” He was born in England to Indian parents, migrated to California as a boy, studied at Eton and Oxford, and currently splits his time between Japan and Santa Barbara. He also ventures throughout the world, and has made travel writing a philosophical adventure. His just-released book Sun After Dark: Flights into the Foreign is an insightful exploration of not only why we travel but also how travel affords us the opportunity to journey into ourselves. Iyer writes that Sun After Dark is “a journey around some of the poorest countries in the world—Yemen, Haiti, Cambodia, Tibet, Ethiopia, Bolivia, Easter Island—and, more deeply, into the altered states of mind, the different states of consciousness that being in those places, often culture-shocked, jetlagged and 12,000 feet above sea level, brings on. The first two main chapters, however, are about spending some time in a Zen temple in L.A. with Leonard Cohen and spending an autumn in Dharamsala with the Dalai Lama—as ways to sound a kind of temple bell at the outset, and to suggest how people can move while sitting still, and how travel (in the Dalai Lama’s case) can be an instrument of conscience and transformation.”

With this event, Arts & Lectures is inaugurating In Conversation, an occasional series that will feature outstanding figures in cultural, academic and political arenas.

Meredith Monk and Pico Iyer are presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures and the UCSB College of Creative Studies. Tickets for the event are $10 for the general public and $8 for UCSB students.

For tickets or more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.

Editor: For photos, please call
George Yatchisin at (805) 893-3494.