Monk’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.
Meredith Monk
Writer, Director
Amram Nowak
Director
Meredith Monk
Child
Ping Chong
The Dictator
Steve Clorfeine
Dictator's Aide
Tone Blevins
Old Testament woman / Dictator
Daniel Ira Sverdlik
Old Testament man / Dictator
Lanny Harrison
Radio Singer / Announcer / Woman in a flowered dress / Dictator
Monica Moseley
Woman at a table / Dictator
Pablo Vela
Man with grey hair / Dictator
Lee Nagrin
Woman with Gray Hair
Clika80%
Coda60%
Battle of the Year67%
Hounddog64%
Jersey Boys67%
Good Vibrations67%
Cadillac Records70%
Grace Unplugged60%
Honey: Rise Up and Dance69%
Teen Spirit60%
Mo' Better Blues64%
Wild Style61%
Mexicali77%
Jailhouse Rock63%
A Late Quartet66%
Beast62%
Pink Floyd: The Wall79%
Too Late Blues63%
The Mambo Kings63%
August Rush74%
