1997
Laurie Anderson
Her Majesty’s
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
Laurie Anderson is describable in so many ways – performance artist, poet, singer, narrator, virtual diva, legend in her own website- that it is easy to overlook just how accomplished she actually is in all these arts, ancient and postmodern, and sciences, big and minimal.
Her current show, The Speed of Darkness, on loan from the Festival of Sydney, features many new, as yet unrecorded, angles of vision from the Innovative One. It is more than ten years since we saw her big screen, high tech show, prototype for Home of the Brave, with its video apparitions of William Burroughs and canny blend of Robert Wilson and Peter Gabriel. Hard-edged, pristine, curiously weightless, it brought the precision of theatrical production values to the rhythmic pleasures of rock and dance music. For some it was like aural tupperware, for others, like eating airline food in heaven.
At fifty years of age, Laurie Anderson is still at the pointy end of what used to be the avant garde. And her achievements are clearer. Recent albums such as Bright Red (Warner Music) produced by that prince of ambience Brian Eno, a CD-ROM entitled Puppet Motel and a flourishing internet site called Green Room all indicate that Anderson is not just up with the trends but state of the art.
On stage this time for the Speed of Darkness , Laurie Anderson is not exactly unplugged but she is looking very … economical. The screens are gone, and the baggy rocket scientist outfits. She leans over a keyboard into two craning microphones. It looks like a news conference, or an inauguration. Dressed in a chic spotted jacket with her hair softly spiky, she is agelessly elfin and aristocratically self-possessed.
Coolly, she takes up a plexiglass violin and draws several bow strokes. The theatre fills with a huge sound, like two Mahler Fifths. The stage speakerboxes are misleadingly compact. Anderson reaches to the keyboard and a hypnotic pulsing begins, a drum program insinuates itself, some bagpipe noises, and then, another thrilling Wagnerian scrape of the violin. It is show business of a very high order, this. Big Science, big music.
But this is not we are here for. “I remember where I came from”, Anderson intones in her breathless whisper, “I remember when my father died. When my father died/ it was like a whole library burned down” It is World Without End from Bright Red. Reading from a script book Laurie Anderson is in personal mode, the show is a monologue with a dance track, The Speed of Darkness is a meditation on the failure of information and the fragility of knowledge. Anderson describes a Cree Native American performing for a film crew. But he can’t remember the words of the dances, he is a fading signal, making up sounds, Hey-ey-a, hey-hey-ey-a.
And if we expected a geewhiz spruik for the internet we were wrong too. No piper at the dawn of Gates here. Anderson sets off another salvo of muttering synths and turns some reverb up on the left hand microphone- Can you feel my heartbeat ? she enquires synthetically. Is this, she asks, how technology is improving the world ? Maybe the Unabomber was right, she wonders and considers founding the Lead Pencil Club. Can this be ? -the audience muses. The Green Room homepage-holder, giving it all the digit ?
Anderson continues her narrative as the synths tick over, a musing there, an observation there. Hints on cooking bratwurst on a hotel lamp, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Alexander the Great trying to spend a coin with his own likeness on it. Computers are making us work harder. And everywhere, the Control Room. The new spin on an old idea, the fantasy of being in charge. On the Star Trek Enterprise, or on the not-so good ship Pequod. Call me html://Ishmael.
Laurie Anderson plays with ideas, dabbles in sound, she trafficks in the insubstantial, the fleeting. Switching on a vocoder she begins a dialogue between her own voice and one slowed down down like a shadowy witness on Sixty Minutes. She sings that old Cree song Hey-ey-a, hey-hey, ey-a. She closes with a song from Bright Red, a spectre of drowning, the world flooded by Muddy River. For an encore we have some pillow talk- or rather she puts a tiny pillow speaker in her mouth and vocalises a slow wah-wah as she gets out the old Mahler violin machine again. More big bowings, more Laurie Anderson signatures. Her work is playful, beguiling, it is meaningful and then elusive. It is, nowadays, less earnestly robotic and more pleasingly sardonic. Come to think of it, it is like eating airline food in heaven.
The Adelaide Review, No.161, February, 1997, p.30.