On stage: Fear factor

The genius is routinely terrified. Meredith Monk, the pioneering vocalist, performance artist and MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" winner, has launched dozens of ambitious multimedia projects during a career spanning more than four decades. Each begins with a frightening feeling of uncertainty.

"Making a piece is like being a detective; you are just stabbing around in the dark trying to find a clue, and then that gets you to the next clue, and it is so uncomfortable," Monk said by phone from the Minneapolis hotel suite that is her home for the first two weeks of June. "When I start a new piece, I am at the edge of the cliff. You have to work through your fear. You are terrified at the beginning of the process. Then interest and curiosity take over and suddenly you are in the process."

The 64-year old artist is in the home stretch of preparing "Songs of Ascension" for preview performances at Walker Art Center this week. It will include Monk's utterly unique, frequently wordless vocal ensemble. The percussionist and reeds player who have become part of her group will add instrumentation from India and Laos to their typical arsenal for this piece, abetted by a string quartet.

The elaborate theatricality one expects from a Monk performance will be enhanced by video imagery from Ann Hamilton, another MacArthur fellow who last collaborated with Monk on "Mercy," a highly lauded production presented at the Walker in 2002.

That's a lot to coordinate in two weeks' time. But Monk is thoroughly engaged, long past the point of groping for clues. The concept behind her latest work began to crystallize a few years ago, when she was speaking with the retired abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center about psalms 120-134, also known as the "Songs of Ascent."

"I realized that in almost every culture, there is this manifestation of going up as a spiritual practice, and I started getting fascinated with that," Monk said. "Ann had told me she was working on a tower [for a site-specific piece] in Sonoma County. ... I was fascinated with trying to do something with her tower."

The tower includes "a double helix eight stories high, and the form of that got me thinking of strands of DNA, and, strangely enough, that became the biggest inspiration for the music -- these large spirals and the way they connect," Monk said.

"It has a lot of movement now, although the music is definitely the driving factor," Monk said. "Musically, it is like a tapestry."

Monk is hardly unique among performance artists in striving to communicate and connect on a more profound level than daily discourse. But as one who made her mark by altering the way we normally perceive the sounds and projections of the human voice, she is better suited than most, and has learned how to utilize other media and artistic forms.

"What music and art can do is uncover energies for which we don't have words, fundamental energies that are always there, but which our discursive minds cover up with chatter and distractions and computers," she said excitedly.

"I want to change the theatrical situation and make it new, so it is not habitual behavior, where you go see something and then have a cup of coffee and talk about it and then go on with your life. I want to subvert that. My fundamental aspiration is emotionally and spiritually you can go home and have a thought about the quality of your life and a sense of questioning. What I am saying is that I hope my art will be useful."