Quarry
1978Monk’s meditation on WWII and recurring cycles of intolerance, fascism, and cruelty in history originated in 1976 as a live stage work utilizing elements of music, images, movement, dialogue, film, sound, and light. This film version, shot on 16mm in the Lepercq Space at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1977, was created in partnership with the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts as part of their initiative to document ground-breaking live performance for future restaging. QUARRY centers on a sick American child (played by Monk herself) whose world darkens as her illness progresses, this darkening including the rise of a dictator. A unique document of this innovative, boundary-blurring production, and a work of art on its own terms, replete with a film-within-a-film directed by Monk in 1975.
Acted in
Meredith Monk
as Child
Ping Chong
as The Dictator
Steve Clorfeine
as Dictator's Aide
Tone Blevins
as Old Testament woman / Dictator
Daniel Ira Sverdlik
as Old Testament man / Dictator
Lanny Harrison
as Radio Singer / Announcer / Woman in a flowered dress / Dictator
Monica Moseley
as Woman at a table / Dictator
Pablo Vela
as Man with grey hair / Dictator
Lee Nagrin
as Woman with Gray Hair
Mary Shultz
as Woman at Table
Gail Turner
as Woman at a table
Anne Gentry
as Visitor at the table
Coco Pekelis
as Maid
Andrea Goodman
as Organist
Steve Lockwood
as Organist
