To call Meredith Monk “multi-talented” barely begins to describe it.

She’s a composer, a vocalist, a filmmaker, a choreographer, a dancer and more. The originality she brings to each of these disciplines marks her as a singular creator, a fact recognized by David Byrne, Björk, Philip Glass, the late choreographer Merce Cunningham and many other fellow artists, yet not widely appreciated by the public. The Oscar-contending documentary Monk in Pieces, directed by Billy Shebar and David C. Roberts, corrects that oversight, capturing her astonishing range of gifts.

Shebar has known Monk for decades – his wife Katie Geissinger appeared in Monk’s opera Atlas in 1990 and has performed in all her major works since.

“I’ve had this kind of front-row seat at just watching her work evolve and also getting to know her as a person,” Shebar explained as he took part in a panel discussion of Monk and Pieces after a screening of the film for Deadline’s For the Love of Docs event series.

Monk agreed to let Shebar and his filmmaking team access her archive including films, photos, and notebooks.

Producer Susan Margolin said, “There had been so much trust built between Meredith and Billy over the years. Meredith just felt very comfortable with him. She’s also expressed how much she loved his prior work, and so seeing his work as a filmmaker gave her the confidence to, in effect, hand over the keys to the kingdom.”

Shebar added, “Anybody who works as a documentary filmmaker knows it’s a huge leap of faith for a subject like Meredith to hand over their story and their work to you. And I knew that in order for this to work, I needed to have editorial independence. That is, Meredith did not review rough cuts of the film because she’s a perfectionist. She’s a filmmaker herself, and she agreed to that, and that I think was incredibly generous on her part.”

As the film explores, it took years, decades even, for Monk’s work to be recognized by critics. Observers who reviewed her work in the early days were often baffled by it because it was so interdisciplinary.

“The Village Voice [in New York] would cover her work, but they wouldn’t send one critic,” Margolin commented. “They would send four critics. So, they would send the dance critic, and they would send the music critic, and they would send the film critic.”

The Village Voice proved receptive to Monk’s work. The New York Times, back in the day, less so.

“The New York Times would send [critic] Clive Barnes and he’d go, ‘I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be here. Am I supposed to be a dance critic or a music critic?’” Shebar added. “So [the Times] had a completely different reaction to her. The fact that she was interdisciplinary… I think to some people is a mark of, ‘Oh, she can’t be serious doing all these different things.’ I think that was a kind of conservative reaction to what she was doing.”

Defying easy classification has been a hallmark of Monk’s career, though not the easiest space to occupy.

“It makes it hard for someone, for the critics or the establishment, to categorize her,” noted editor Sabine Krayenbühl. “We encounter it as artists generally. Once you do a film that is successful in one way, you’re getting asked to do the same thing over and over again. Even within… your discipline, it’s very hard sometimes to jump genres because people just like to be able to know what they’re getting. I think that’s the main thing. It’s sort of like you’re getting a meal, and if you can’t identify what it is, you don’t want to eat it.”

To deal with a lack of understanding from critics in the past (a 1971 review by Deborah Jowitt alerted New York Times readers that a Monk record “made my cats bite each other”), Monk has needed a thick skin. Or a hard shell, one might say, like a turtle.

Turtles, in fact, amble through the documentary at regular intervals. Monk’s live-in companion for 40 years or so was a turtle she named Neutron. And she cast a turtle in a film she directed – the animal was shot to look like a giant creature walking through a cityscape, like Godzilla in Tokyo. The recurring reptile theme brought a certain visual coherence to a documentary constructed in atypical fashion.

“When you work in the structure that we were working in, which is a mosaic structure, it’s not linear. You don’t have the crutch of A, B, C, D narrative to kind of keep things moving,” Shebar observed. “So, you have to find your own sort of thematic through lines or little through lines about her relationship with Neutron that you can sort of seed throughout. You have to look for these kinds of repeated themes and images. And so that was something that Sabine and I worked on a lot, I would say, or even things that you’re not even aware of, ways of connecting one scene with the next, so that one scene feels like it answers the next.”

Watch the full interview with the Monk in Pieces team above.

We conclude our fall event series For the Love of Docs next Tuesday with a screening of another Oscar-contending film, Cutting Through Rocks, directed by Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni. This story of a remarkable woman in Iran who defied patriarchal culture to bring real change to her village earned the Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema Documentary at Sundance, as well as the Audience Award at the recently concluded International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), along with many other awards.

To RSVP for the screening of Cutting Through Rocks, click here.