In 2010 - 2011 Laurie
Anderson toured with her multimedia show called Delusion.
This tour followed the
release of Homeland and some material - notably "Another Day In
America" - was reused from this album, but most was new. Some of the
material has now found its way onto her recent album Heart Of A Dog and
it's prompted me to revisit a splendid, crystal clear audience recording
from Hamburg in May 2011.
As always with Laurie
the material works on many levels. Ostensibly Delusion is a
series of meditations on death, though it goes much further than that.
The promo blurb says this –
Conceived as a series
of short mystery plays, Delusion jump-cuts between the everyday and
the mythic. Combining violin, electronic puppetry, music and visuals, Delusion is
full of nuns, elves, golems, rotting forests, ghost ships, archaeologists, dead
relatives and unmanned tankers. It tells its story in the colourful and poetic
language that has become Anderson's trademark. Inspired by the breadth of
Balzac, Ozu and Laurence Sterne, and employing a series of altered voices and
imaginary guests, Anderson tells a complex story about longing, memory and
identity. At the heart of Delusion is the pleasure of language and a
terror that the world is made entirely of words.
Phew!
Well, the first piece
concerns Laurie’s technique for pushing herself on the try new things, "a
basic carrot before the donkey technique" she says, "until one day…
the donkey died…" This piece, typically for Laurie, is both very funny,
and then suddenly very shocking. The audience laughs and then all too often
stops laughing abruptly when the full meaning of what she's said suddenly sinks
in.
A little further on and
another recitation begins, “I was standing in the room…” and relates the
touching story of an old lady at the moment of her death. She's surrounded
by her family and friends, but the old lady is talking to the animals… on the
ceiling… and Laurie relates this tale of the delusional lady in her usual…
calm…. voice and the narrative contains those… unusual…. pauses that punctuate
Laurie’s stories. There is such a beautiful violin underscoring the narrative,
that the strange text becomes incredibly moving. Really stunning stuff.
In fact most of Delusion is
surprisingly emotional. Not sure why I am surprised. I suppose I think of
Laurie Anderson as more of a clever manipulator of words and sounds than I do
as an emotional songwriter and lyricist. But although Laurie's work can
sometimes appear detached, a little cold on the surface, there's always a
deeply emotional core.
Throughout Delusion there
are bizarre excursions into Laurie’s dreams (where apparently it’s always
raining) - in one she is served penguin in a restaurant, though it’s not clear
if the penguin is actually dead yet… at another point she talks of an Icelandic
farmer who is trying to rebuild a rotting barn so he can hold barn dances, but
she’s more concerned with the fact that he can see elves… and there’s a frankly
disturbing sequence where she believes she has given birth to her favourite
dog, Lola-belle - this crops up on Heart Of A Dog too.
Musically there’s loads
of mournful and genuinely emotional violin / viola going on, really powerful
pieces of music, multi-tracked and magnified. The deep voiced reassuring tones
of the voice of authority, who Lou Reed had recently named as Fenway Bergamot,
pops up on some pieces. But it’s the words in Laurie's own quiet voice
that really hit home, somehow conveying real loss and hurt and confusion in
those calm measured phrases.
And it’s fairly clear
that, despite the promotional blurb, Delusion is pretty much all
about Death - towards the end the dying old lady crops up again and, with
a start, you realise that it’s Laurie’s own mother. It’s a shocking and
terribly sad piece. Laurie has to rush to the hospital, and she doesn't know
what to say to her dying mother. Not sure how true all of this is. And
although I guess it’s all part of the act, part of the performance, Laurie
herself seems to step out of that ultra calm… narrator voice, the one who
leaves long… pauses… and she actually sounds genuinely worked up and frustrated
and helpless and agitated, and it’s really quite a shock and the whole thing
becomes desperately sad.
Immensely clever stuff,
just Laurie, her simple instruments and the occasional voice of Fenway Bergamot
and the result is 90 minutes of something that utterly transports you to
somewhere else.
Really impressive.
Here’s an interesting
interview from that time –
In Delusion, a new
piece commissioned by the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad, musician, composer
and multimedia artist Laurie Anderson will use mystery plays, photography,
electronic puppetry and newly composed music to “explore mythic and everyday
worlds.” Driven by her poetic use of language and inspired by everything from
the mystic origins of the Russian space program to theories of time and speed,
the show is set to be yet another in Anderson’s groundbreaking and
envelope-pushing repertoire. (It also features a fictional historian and social
commentator named Fenway Bergamot and his spotted dog.) Along with special
musical guests Eyvind Kang and Colin Stetson, Delusion gets its world
premiere February 16 at the Vancouver Playhouse.
Q: In an early
description of Delusion, you talk about how language has the ability to both
create and decreate the world. Can you tell me more about that?
A: First of all, I’ve
never talked about this thing [Delusion], and I haven’t finished it yet, (laughs).
I haven’t found a way to finish it yet. There are a couple of things missing
from the picture and I’m just starting to figure out what they are now. I
began by writing a number of plays, two plays, in an attempt to get away from
the voice I usually use. I wanted to bring some conflict into it. That was the
beginning of trying to tell a story from a couple of different sides, which of
course, in answer to your question, starts making you think, “What is the
story?” The story is really the narrator or the writer. And when someone tells
you a story, whether it’s Obama or your brother, you’re going to read the thing
really differently.
This is a whole series
of interlocked stories and delusions. There are many, many different ways to
tell them, and in many different types of voices. It’s not so much
deconstructing the story as changing the voice in which they’re told. I’ve
realized that the same exact words could be on a page and they could be in a
live situation, or in a conversation, they could be the saddest thing you’ve
ever heard, or really callous, or carefree. You can attach a whole lot of
things to that.
Q: Where did Fenway
Bergamot come from?
A: I don’t know quite
how this voice, this filter, got a name. It is an "audio-drag” filter that
I’ve used since 1978, when I first had to be a master of ceremonies at a
[William S.] Burroughs event. I thought it would be fun to sound like a
distracted old coot. Recently, it’s had a more melancholic ring to it, and I’ve
been thinking that it almost sounds like a person.
It was Lou [Reed] who
decided to call this character Fenway Bergamot, and as soon as that filter had
a name it was almost like I could do something different emotionally with that
filter. It didn’t have to be just a joke. So I began to be able to use words in
a different way with that instead of just being joke-y. I used to call it “the
voice of authority” but now it doesn’t have much authority left. It frees me to
use language in a more cut-up way.
Q: In an old interview,
you said you like to keep things simple, that you don’t want everything to get
too complicated regardless of the whole multimedia aspect of your show. You
seem to use such a complex mix of elements — your violin and puppetry and
visuals. Do you think it’s easier to get at simple truths with complex methods?
A: If I just minded my
own advice… (laughs) Not necessarily. The only way to get there is to try to
pay attention to them. Although I do have to say that one of the ways I tried
to get to those things this time was through images. I sat for a long time
looking at stuff and just listening to sounds. Not one single word. I thought,
“I really enjoy this show. I really like it just like this,” and for awhile I
was just going to have zero words. Then I thought, “Wait a second. I’ve never
done that.” But it was really, really tempting. Now, in a way, I’m just trying
to pare the words down even further, but some of them don’t like that. Some of
them have to be the shaggy dog story they started out as. Paring them down, they
become really silly. I’m in a bit of a dilemma right at the moment with some of
this stuff.
When you make something
from absolutely nothing, there’s no template for it, and there’s no way to say
that something isn’t what you wanted it to be, because that was just a vague
idea. I’m not making shoes. I don’t know what I’m making. A lot of time I’ve
started out to make one thing and I’ve ended up making something utterly
different. I would begin writing a piece of music and it would become a
drawing. I’m talking really different. I’m in a state of insecurity at the
moment.
Q: Could that be why,
when some people describe you, they use words like “innovator”? That you have
this ability to bring things from nothing into existence?
A: Everyone can do that
if they want to. I’m convinced of that, that’s for sure. That everyone can’t is
a bit of a myth, in the sense that absolutely everyone can sing. I think people
are taught that they can’t do stuff way too early. I just wish we had a
national music day like they do in France, when everybody sings and it doesn’t
really matter if it’s not all in tune. That’s part of why I’m bothered that
half of the things I do are amateur in a way, in a lot of ways. The animation I
do is kind of amateur, the orchestration is pretty amateur, but I give them all
a shot and I try not to worry that it doesn’t look very pro.
Q: In a 2007 interview
on Swedish television you asked a rhetorical question about if the world needs
another multimedia show. Does it?
A: Ha. Good question.
At the time, I probably was going to do another one anyway. Needed or not, I
might just have fun doing it. I don’t know… I wish I knew what the world
needed. If I knew, I would try to contribute. But I have no idea what it needs,
so I just try to think of something else that would be interesting to do.
