For over a week now, many of us have stared at Meredith Monk’s picture on the Oberlin website — the one where she has cornrows and sways to one side with her eyes closed, looking like a true hippie. We look at her and wonder, what’s this “rule-breaking” artist all about? Monk’s lecture on Wednesday to a jam-packed Hallock Auditorium gave students a glimpse into her journey to stardom and her interdisciplinary approach to art.

As theater professor Roger Copeland pointed out in his introduction, Monk’s resume is vast. She has won numerous awards in every genre she works in: vocal performance, filmmaking, theater, opera and multimedia installations (and the list continues to grow). Everything she touches turns to gold.

I came to Monk’s lecture with one question: how can she spread herself so thin working in all these different media and yet be so successful? As she narrated her life’s story, Monk revealed her philosophy that art is fluid; all genres inform and influence each other.

The daughter of two singers, Monk studied Dalcroze Eurythmics as a child — a method of learning music through movement and the body’s rhythms. She went on to study theater, dance and voice at Sarah Lawrence College, choreographing gestural, image-based dance pieces. While living in New York and working on dance pieces after Sarah Lawrence, Monk returned to her vocal work and realized that the voice could express the same ideas her body expressed in dance.

“Specialization is a Western idea,” said Monk, who believes that her work weaves together all aspects of perception. She admits, though, that working in so many media is not easy: “You have to work real hard to keep up all the tools,” she said.

As a preview of the performance she will give on Saturday, Monk performed a vocal piece with collaborator Katie Geissinger. Facing each other behind the microphone, Monk and Geissinger sang tones that jumped back and forth from a high register to a low register and vice versa. The low tones were sometimes hummed, while the high staccato notes sounded like hiccups or the mating calls of birds. There were no lyrics, just two women throwing sound back and forth like a baseball, responding and reacting to each other.

It’s easy to see how Monk’s dance background influences her vocal performances. Not only does her body bounce with the rhythm of her song, but she makes visual images with her body as she sings, facing Geissinger, Monk leaned forward at several points, opening her mouth wide to let lower, longer notes spill out, drawing attention to the visceral experience of singing and speaking.

This tidbit of Monk’s work proves her art searches for the space between genres (“What are the limits to this medium?” she asks herself in every endeavor.) Monk is always trying to mix things up; she described one performance she did in her kitchen one morning with bread she had baked.

“We always go to the theater at night, see a performance, talk about whether or not we liked it, and then the next day it has disappeared from our lives. How can we subvert these habitual practices that keep us asleep and see the magic in very ordinary things? That’s what art is. It’s kind of like Brave New World, now. We have so many forms of ‘soma’ — the computer, the TV — a culture of distraction. How do we wake up?”