Laurie Anderson Revisited

Once again, after work I headed downtown to Playhouse Square. I had a good chicken lo mein and excellent potstickers at China Sea Express, as Otto's was closed on Sunday. The restaurant was almost vacant, which was fairly pleasant, but then a very outgoing certified wack-o came in, and group of four. The wack-o sat across from the four top, but almost instantaneously stood up and joined in their conversation. They were fairly polite, but clearly bothered by his unsolicited attention. I was glad that my meal was just about over, because I was loathe to be the next victim.

Anyway, back to the lobby where I waited for "TinTen" to arrive. We had great seats (about 6 rows back on the aisle) for Laurie Anderson's new show, The End Of The Moon. I was quite surprised on seeing the stage. There was an upholstered armchair on stage right, and at center stage, a small keyboard stand, and a very small screen on stage left. Scattered about the stage floor were about a hundred tea lights. That was it. It was a great contrast to the old Laurie Anderson stage performances, which were multimedia extravaganzas, often requiring so much equipment that it filled two semi-trucks. I last saw Ms. Anderson here at the Palace Theatre way back in March of 1995 performing just such a show, The Nerve Bible, along with my friends Brokenbrush and TunaMusic.

"My own work is more about trying to ask really good questions and not trying to come up with really big shows. Every fashion company is doing that, every car company is doing that. They're all doing multimedia shows. One of the things that I learned from working on the Olympics was that I was hired as a tech geek, someone whose done big multimedia shows. I said, "The world does not need another big multimedia show."

The End Of The Moon is an impressionistic, dreamlike collection of stories and observations, all glued together with music interludes, which attempt to shed light on some of the most brain-melting quandaries we face.

This show began with an inquiry: Who told you what beauty was?

The element of time is also a major theme.

"It begins with this idea of stuttering and how difficult it is to start things. People only stutter at the beginning of the word, they don't say "stuttering-ing-ing-ing" because they're not afraid when they get to the end of the word. There's just regret."

In the course of the show she told two miraculous stories. The first was about a walk she took with her rat terrier on the California coast. She related how the terrier would always run ahead, nose to ground, searching left and right for intruders, protecting her. Then, an eagle swooped down, poised to carry the dog away, but in Anderson's eyes, decided the dog was a wee bit too big, and just ... hovered over it for awhile. Anderson said that she saw a brand new thought pass through the dog's head, that intruders can come from ABOVE. She describes how in future walks, the dog's posture was thrown off, trying to reconcile this new knowledge, and to keep an eye on the skies as well as the ground. This seamlessly segued into our post 9-11 behaviour. It was chillingly, beautifully done.

"End of the Moon is about the queasy feelings you might have. It's dreamier. More abstract. There is a lot more trepidation about the future. There's uncertainty. It's my best attempt at describing life at this moment."

The second story was about a concert she was doing outdoors in Greece. She heard this odd sound, and thought that it might be feedback, or someone playing an instrument, or even a child. When the sound persisted, she noticed that it was mimicking her own vocalizations. Then she looked up into a tree that was near the stage. An owl was there, watching and echoing her sounds. Anderson says she thought that she could drop dead right at that moment, because there was nothing better than doing a duet with that owl.

The last influence on this work was Anderson's recent tenure as the first (and last) Artist-In-Residence for NASA. Indiana congressman Chris Chocola considered the $20,000 stipend paid to Anderson "an example of government wasteful spending" and successfully introduced an amendment to an appropriations bill last June that prevents NASA from funding such a position again. She considers much of this work to be her "official report" to NASA about her tenure there.

Watching Anderson perform is an odd experience. Her movements are few, and there is simply not a lot to watch. But it is her voice, low, quiet and measured that insinuates itself into your thoughts, and for long moments you think that what you are hearing is just your subconscious voice - but it's way more eloquent and poetic than it has ever been. This experience felt very much like a waking dream.

Says Anderson, "I like it when we fall into that communal dream."

There you go.