Slideshow is Laurie Anderson on speed. I’ve seen her many times before. I’ve seen the mostly music shows, and I’ve seen the mostly storytelling with some music shows. But this is something else.
Laurie starts, as is her wont, by walking on with her customised electric violin and playing. But on this occasion, it is a short piece, and one of only very few musical interludes in the evening.
As she starts to speak, she is in an oddly naturalistic mode, chatting to us in an informal way, at a pretty fast speed, which is very different to her usual slow and measured performance mode. She tells us that she considered using this occasion to do her first-ever stand-up comedy show, her Plan A, but decided that wasn’t such a good idea as she only knows two jokes. She tells us one of them – and it’s one I’ve heard numerous times before, as it is from Homeland. An elderly couple who can’t stand the sight of each other finally divorce when in their 90s, and people say: Why did you wait so long? Well, they said, we wanted to wait until the children died. Told in a straight-up way, as a stand-up joke, it is has less impact than when delivered in the slow, deep, menacing voice you can hear on Another Day in America, but still – we laughed.
The new, perky, fast-paced Laurie continues at breakneck speed through a phenomenal number of stories. They tumble out of her, as the slides change on the back wall.
A sense of place is what this show is about. Place and places. We race around the world, and occasionally even further afield. There’s Elsinore, in Denmark, where she encounters an ominous sense of unease, and where all her equipment has technical problems, parking a reflection on the need to always have a Plan B. Images of the Egyptian pyramids go with a story of being a teacher who forgets the facts and starts to make things up. See those slits in the pyramids? They are where the sun shines in on one day a year and wakes up the mummies. A picture of Mars pops up, created not by cameras but by transposing into image sound waves bounced from the planet’s surface. There are images of space rockets that accompany a section on her time spent as artist-in-residence at NASA, where she ultimately shied away from creating some sort of technological art-sci piece and instead decided to write a poem (for those of us who saw the show that came out of that residency, we remember that it was a very beautiful poem, delivered on a stage lit by hundreds of tiny nightlights).
There’s a quaint and lovely section using what she calls a ‘pillow speaker’ in her mouth, which enables her to sing like a violin or roar like a lion; and a story of the thing getting glued onto the roof of her mouth. Yep, this is a comedy show, no doubt about it.
A riff on Aristophanes’ The Birds that she has linked in to a reflection on Donald Trump and his Mexican wall doesn’t quite work. She’s racing through it, and she ends up saying ‘go read the play for yourselves.’ Time for joke two, which is about the crucifixion – always good for a laugh. She carries this one off well.
There’s then a shift in mood and tone as we have two pre-existing pieces, familiar from last year’s Brighton Festival show and/or from the film Heart of a Dog; these presented in her hypnotic ‘poet’ voice rather than this new breakneck speed ‘stand-up comedian’ persona. A spine-chilling tale of broken ice and almost-drowned babies; and the marvellous section from the film about a childhood accident that left her in hospital for months, with a fear that she would never walk again. In both these stories, the interplay between her voice, the music, and the moving image, is totally magical.
Following another soulful violin section, played to a projection of trees in the snow, there’s another flurry of places and stories, all of which are unfamiliar to me, so possibly new material, all highly entertaining. A reflection on Thorreau’s Walden Pond (he had a cabin to hole himself up in, but it was close enough to his family house to enable him to nip over for some milk and cookies when he felt the need); a musing on the delights of London’s legendary Marks & Co bookshop (immortalised in 84 Charing Cross Road); a hilarious encounter of a Buddhist group trip down a river in Utah that tested every belief about tolerance and acceptance of other people that she held; and a great story about spending time in an Amish family who were consumed with silent rage and resentment.
A large chunk at the end of the show sees a shift again into lecturer mode, as she reports back on a major ongoing project, creating an installation that forges a direct link between a prison (or specifically, one prisoner) and a cultural centre, the most recent manifestation of which has seen her working with an ex-Guantanamo Bay prisoner called Mohammed (pictured with Laurie in the featured image, above).
The show ends, and we realise that somehow two hours have gone by in a flash. It’s difficult to give any sort of critical response to what has been witnessed. It’s a totally mixed bag of performance and lecture and, well yes – stand-up comedy. Some of it works brilliantly, some of it feels like she’s winging it, and it gets a bit messy. It is so different to her usual shows, which are scripted and honed and tweaked until they are perfectly ready for public consumption, that it is a complete surprise. On this occasion, she had notes scribbled on bits of paper; there were quite a lot of ‘ers’ and ‘ums’; and she sometimes encountered technical hitches whilst operating the slides (yes, she was alone on stage and seemed to be doing everything other than the lights herself).
We leave the auditorium with our heads reeling. So many images. So many words. So many ideas. It’ll take a long time to digest all this. I’m sure we will encounter a lot of the new material again, honed into other structures. I loved being witness to this Anderson mash-up. Look out comedy circuit, Laurie Anderson is on your case.