Four decades after performing her live dissection of Reagan’s America, United States, avant-garde icon Laurie Anderson will debut the next instalment in Manchester this month, throwing a typically clarifying light on our uniquely troubled times
On 3 February 1983, Laurie Anderson walked on stage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. At that time, there had never really been anyone like her: as crafty as Benjamin Franklin; as attuned as David Bowie to how far the strictures of pop music could be stretched; as comfortable in Philip Glass-y “high art” mode as in raucous, provocative, Richard Pryor-style comedy. But Anderson was something of her own invention. Her 1981 single O Superman somehow became a global pop smash, even as its eerie electro and paranoid, sinister humour sounded totally out of it. After making her way through Europe, she had come here, back to New York, to talk about her home, in an eight-hour show spread across four nights, called United States. “A certain American religious sect has been looking at conditions of the world during the flood,” she said directly into the microphone, to open the first night. “According to their calculations… pre-flood civilisation [was] somewhere in the area of upstate New York, and the Garden of Eden in New York City.” The crowd laughed. “There are no traces of biblical history in the upstate New York area,” shrugged Anderson. Her conclusion? “The ark has simply not left yet.”
Forty years later, ARK: United States V picks up where Anderson left off. The stage show, which debuts this month at Manchester’s Factory International, mixes film, AI, live feeds from around the world and performance art, alongside what’s become her signature assemblage of songs for violin, electronics and percussion. It’s all a frame for her inimitable voice, often manipulated through harmonizers to take shape as male authority figures, female mystics and post-gender time travellers. And also for what her voice is trying to say; which might be that if the ark still hasn’t left yet, the flood is here.