Music Review
Bite 08
Laurie Anderson: Homeland
Created and Performed by Laurie Anderson
Featuring Eyvind Kang, Peter Scherer and Skuli Sverrisson
Barbican Theatre
30 April – 03 May, 2008
A review by Mary Couzens for EXTRA! EXTRA!
Having first come to public attention in the UK in 1981 via the late John Peel’s radio play of her record, ‘O, Superman’, resulting in a number two on the music charts, Laurie Anderson, American musician, performance artist, composer, inventor, oft proclaimed ‘first hi-tech poet,’ has, since the actual start of her career in New York in 1973, seemed to many to be much wiser than her years. Now, at the age of sixty-one, Anderson also has the added insight which results from experiencing, and/or witnessing events which tie in with own time-line. In her latest show, Homeland, Anderson wryly focuses on the foibles and follies inherent to the often unpopular, but no less vengeful politics of her country’s present government administration as well as those of her homeland’s variously variegated people trying to live their lives in the landscape of post 9/11 America. Four performers, Anderson among them, walk onto the stage. They are dressed in black and they imbue the scene, with its long white electrical cords, dangling light-bulbs and sea of clear glass lanterns housing snowy, flickering candles a decidedly monotone, yet nonetheless animated cast. Anderson begins her musical repartee with a fragilely intoned piece which she says, is a ‘short story from before the world began…the beginning of memory,’ which, from the first intonation of her mesmerizing voice, seems instantly, unbelievably, plausible. It is about, she claims, a time when birds flew endlessly because they had nowhere to land, and her voice lilts and lifts with the bird sounds interwoven into the music, granting it a feeling of near levitation. It is a sublime cacophony between the ‘real’ and the imagined. Immediately following this lullaby of an introduction, Aaron Copp’s shifting, colour saturated lighting turns a bright, penetrating red, as an ominous haze clouds the creative environment onstage. ‘Let Me Burn Your City’, Anderson snarls, ‘…your churches, your mosques,’ before singing in bird-like harmony with her self-styled instrument. The music is high-flying, with an industrial beat and static echoes rippling through it designed to instill tension. ‘Because I’m a Bad Guy’, Anderson reasons, her voice becoming high-pitched, blending in with her instrument until the two are barely discernable, inspiring shudders while pulling the proverbial rug of complacency out from under her audience. ‘I believe in liberty, the flag, democracy,’ she continues in a ‘don’t get me wrong’ tone, but…’There’s no place for freedom when war is here to stay.’ One of her musical colleagues adds slight suggestions of radio broadcasts to signify America’s, (and perhaps, mankind’s) seemingly never-ending involvement in warfare. Viola, bass and keyboard join her in musically progressing from threatening through ominous, and deep down to potently mournful. The culminating moment of the piece finds Anderson alone in the spotlight with her instrument generating incredibly beautiful, thoroughly haunting sounds. But there is no time to linger, for there is much ground to cover within the context of her appraisal of her homeland. ‘It’s a good time for winners,’ Anderson intones, this time, in a confident, male voice – her own, cleverly pitched down to the basement. This is another side of her, her animus, as it were - a factionary ‘thinking man’ whose vision and conviction match her own. The lighting shifts to blue for her memorable treatise on ‘this transitory life,’ with its metaphoric ‘trapped bird’ - yet another image for the memory to ponder, as her hypnotic delivery and penetratingly profound words simultaneously propel one’s imagination, and social conscience into overdrive. Anderson’s recurring themes of impermanence in the face of the impenetrable machine and gadget age are enjoined with those of the endless quest for liberty in the face of political tyranny in Homeland, topics which naturally coalesce and are much in need of further conjoined artistic exploration. These couplings are manifested here through music that conversely, often contains aspects of meditative chanting within its many layers. The lighting moves back to candlelight as it does between each performance interlude and the music assumes a percolating beat as Anderson says, ‘Half the problem is seeing the problem, and only an expert can deal with the problem. In America, we like solutions and we’ve got companies to deal with problems.’ She then lists a number of problems to be dealt with from the deadly serious to the ‘hair’ apparent - daggers of truth cloaked in humour. Her tone becomes more urgent as she wonders aloud, on behalf of unsatisfied consumers everywhere, ‘How can I get control?’ adding the statistics that ’60% of Americans are 1.3 paychecks from homelessness,’ concluding with the fact that, ‘often the solution becomes part of the problem.’ Yet another comment on the American government’s habit of reaching supposedly logical conclusions through illogical means. Which is, ‘expertly’ illustrated by the piece’s concluding insight, ‘Only an expert can deal with weapons.’ The fact that these rallying probes are launched to music which has underpinnings of both galloping Vaudeville and rousingly lively Yiddish strains encourages its listeners to address the folly of foolishly fiddling while home burns. But, at the same time that Anderson warns that ‘Your silence will be considered your consent,’ she also acknowledges that Kierkegaard believed that ‘life can only be understood if it is lived backwards.’ Both thoughts are juxtaposed against a musical weave containing elements of outer and inner space, via the cosmos and aspects of traditional church music. The very moving ‘I Love the Stars (because we can’t hurt them),’ is so pointedly and simplistically truthful, it’s painful to hear, with its desolate clanging sounds, like a rusted sign flapping in the spectral breezes of a forlorn ghost town. If Anderson’s musical pieces are auditory hallucinations, they are scenic, as well as instructive ones. ‘Maybe If I Fall’ mirrors the displacement one can feel at ‘home’ as scenarios change and illusions fall away. The piece’s closing admission that ‘Everything eventually comes crawling home,’ echoes the inevitable call of the homing instinct, which is punctuated by a sound reminiscent of the low rumbling of thunder. A green light signals the arrival of the Anderson’s ‘enormous and perfect’ Underwear Gods’, a pointedly witty piece about the wall sized ads painted on the sides of buildings in NYC and other cosmopolitan cities world-wide. A change of pitch and mood takes place again as Anderson sings of a sunrise and the accompanying lighting assumes a yellow-orange glow, particularly when seen ‘Out of the Heart of a Child.’ This gently poignant piece naturally sets up the next in which she speaks thoughtfully of a photo seen in the New York Times of a young woman enlisting, so she can ‘ get a free education,’ which prompts her to observe that the alleged ‘war on terror’ is ‘like a kid’s war,’ in that ‘They Keep Calling Them Up.’ In conclusion Anderson wonders whether America’s Constitution is ‘written in invisible ink.’ The music accompanying her musings assumes middle-eastern undertones. In ‘Strange Perfume’ the question is raised as to whether ‘an island should control a continent,’ or ‘a country should rule the world.’ During this eerily evocative lament, the innocently stated line, ‘the towers have fallen’ almost seems to mimic the old ‘London Bridge is falling down,’ nursery rhyme, albeit, in Anderson’s own uniquely inimitable style. Nixon’s removal of America’s ‘gold standard’ has, over time, resulted in, she shrewdly observes, the loss of ‘records’ as well as ‘phone booths’ as ‘pictures began to replace things,’ and ‘screens were everywhere.’ The masculine persona is again assumed, complete with manly eyebrow raising and body language to great effect, as Anderson takes on the role of a motivational speaker (tapes on sale in the lobby) who locks antlers with someone with ‘large Byzantine eyes, who never blinks…unless his blinks were synchronized,’ with his/her own. That particular observation even extracted laughs from the long dormant audience members whom, one assumed, must have been cruising along on automatic pilot until that moment. As Anderson sang of ‘the spirit of motion,’ her voice seemed to assume a sense of weightlessness. This dualistic mirroring was made all the more effective by her continuation of the same repetitive movements over and over as she repeated the phrase, ‘I was thinking of you,’ several times, before trailing off into, ‘I wasn’t thinking of you,’ generating a sense of the loss of formerly precious memories with the passage of time. ‘The Lost Art of Conversation’ almost seemed to counteract her long term partner (husband as of April 12, 2008) Lou Reed’s song, ‘New York Conversation’ (Transformer 1972), detailing his observations of the gossipy activities in Warhol’s Factory, as Anderson’s piece considers relationships from a much deeper, more heart-felt perspective. It was easy to picture Anderson’s comments, taken from a news report, suggesting that the women of Texas might consider ‘carrying handguns in their handbags,’ being quickly followed by a female politician’s intentionally stereo-typical response that if handguns were carried in handbags, women would ‘never be able to find them.’ In the past, Anderson has been known to refer to her alternately ambient, electronic, avant-garde rock, storytelling, performance art, filmmaking, a.k.a. endlessly indefinable, totally original, fascinating performances as simply, ‘visual music’. However, as she does not resort to using accompanying projections in Homeland, in a recent interview with the Guardian, she preferred to deem her new show as, "one-third political, one-third from an odd dream world, and the rest music." In regard to the musical aspects of her latest show, Anderson, always a ground-breaking artist, told Australian reporter Chris Boyd while in Sydney late last year, that her current work is, “much more about improvising, much more about music than things I've done in the past. This is a back pocket show. It's probably the most technically complicated, but it looks the simplest. It's really been reduced... everything's a soft-syn, everything's a pedal. There are very few things that are visible. And that's really satisfying for me. I've worked forever to be able to do that.” However you view Anderson’s ever experimental takes on her subject matter, they are, in this show, no less surprising and enlightening than in her prior ground-breaking outings. With her innovative, self-invented “tape-bow violin” in hand, and laptop and console nearby, she, and her three accompanying musical artisans take their audience through the layers of her Homeland, with it’s all its paradoxical themes: technology versus humanity for one, with an inventiveness that most musicians and performance artists could only dream about. That comes as no surprise, as with each uniquely inspiring, undeniably exciting performance event Laurie Anderson creates she further expands the borderless horizons of her own insightfully creative output.
90 minutes, no interval
Copyright © EXTRA! EXTRA All rights reserved
|
|
