Inspired by the ancient legend of Indra’s net, which depicts the Buddhist concept of interpenetration, Meredith Monk’s latest work metaphorizes the interdependency of humans with the natural world. “Indra’s Net” meditates on the earth’s vulnerability through a multimodal interplay of sound, silence, gesture, space, and time. Throughout the performance, Monk, her cohort of seven other vocalists, and a team of instrumentalists sonified the planet’s precarity, while a giant orb towered behind them in the background. At times the orb glittered with an assortment of minimalist, mostly black-and-white video projections; during the final vignette, the tops of the performers’ heads were scattered like jewels across the orb as it played host to an aerial view of the stage. In fact, the legend’s titular net is studded with jewels signifying everything we ever do, everything done to us, and how the effects of our actions inescapably alter the entire balance of the net: “At every node in this net there is a precious jewel, and whatever affects one jewel affects all of them.”
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