Among all the elements of a dream that tell us it’s a dream and not reality, surely that special effect of seamless transition to a whole different scenario is the most dream-like. You know the effect: one moment you’re a on a plane to Hawaii, the next you’re at grandma’s open coffin. Both are realistic enough in themselves to fool you, but it’s when you ask, “Huh? How did I get here?” that you realize it’s all a dream.
There were several moments during Laurie Anderson’s quiet and slippery show at the Centre for the Performing Arts the night of Saturday October 18 when I was asking, “Huh? How did she get there?” No one does dream like Laurie Anderson.
She pioneered New York experimental music in the 1980s with special effects in shows, videos, instruments and sounds that have made her one of the most influential, if not the most popularly known, musicians of the last couple of decades. Productions that mimic or develop off her inventions proliferate throughout popular music today in several genres.
To grasp the range of Anderson’s thinking, consider that she was NASA’s one and so far only artist-in-residence, was commissioned by Encyclopedia Britannica to write the entry on New York, has been long time companion to Lou Reed whom she married last April, and has worked closely with such diverse talents as William S Burroughs, Brian Eno, Nona Hendryx, Andy Kaufman, Philip Glass and Peter Gabriel.
She began her artistic career as a sculptor. In 1981, her “O Superman” recording topped out at number two on British pop charts (readers may recall the hypnotic “ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah,” the voice-instrument sound that pervades the song start to finish). Her recording, with William S Burroughs, of spoken-word song “Sharkey’s Night,” is surely one of the most memorable recordings of her, and his, entire and varied career.
It’s no happy accident that Anderson evoked the effect of dreams in her show Saturday. An exhibition of drawings, prints and video in New York in 2005, called The Waters Reglitterized, attempted to investigate dreams using the language of dreams itself. Her show in a way completes a big circle in her career, dispensing entirely with her more familiar wild movements, powerful video image backdrops and full stages, to present instead just three seated accompanists, classical chamber music-style, on a spare black stage empty of props but for about one hundred small candles, and a blank screen behind which subtly shifted between solid tonal colours.
The music was spare as well, almost dispensing with musicality, sometimes even with starts and finishes altogether, to present instead assemblages of sounds not so much to be listened to as to be taken in, receptively, by the audience not to be put to sleep but to be put to alert, active, almost lucid, dreaming.
The show opened with a myth, possibly invented, that was never referred to again in the duration of the show, which cleverly enhanced its poignancy rather than diminished it by making the audience continuously look for its elaboration throughout the show. The myth was about birds in the time before there was land. Unable to bury the body of a dead father, a young bird decided instead to bury her father in the back of her mind, thus inventing memory.
With that myth in the back of the audience’s mind, Anderson was then able to deposit the contents of her show directly into the memories of her audience, bypassing entirely the filters of personal interpretation that normally mitigate our memories. The effect was striking: next day, as I tried to recall her show, I wasn’t even sure I had attended it, instead it was already a memory of a dream I didn’t have. It was her dream, and she planted it in the back of my mind. She’s a good artist.
The contents of the dream memory treated reactions to events in the world that we’re all grappling with in deeper, more profound ways than I think we presently realize or admit to each other. Her show is called Homeland in order to evoke the new security state of the hyper-imperialism the United States has unleashed at home and around the world. The content, delivered in the calm repose of sleep-induced dreaming, where we lie perfectly still and unconscious as slaughters and betrayals unfold around us, were ugly and frightening. She recalled to us the old western movies where a breathless man would rush into a saloon crying, “There’s trouble at the mine!” whereupon the card players, the piano player, the bar-gripping drinkers and the bartender would all drop what they were doing and rush out to the mine, leaving the place empty with the half-size saloon doors swinging. Then she turned to us and cried in a whisper, “There’s trouble at the mine! There’s trouble at the mine!”
In another song, Anderson sings in her trademark innocent questioning tone, “I make many speeches, but they’re all in my head, and they are all full of despair. You know what I’m talking about.” The name of her show could just as well have been Despair-land as Homeland. We all know intimately what she means. One of the seamless dream-like transitions in the show comes right amidst the myth of the birds, at the very beginning, when suddenly, without us catching where the transition was, she is singing to us, “There is no place for freedom when war is here to stay.”
In the program, Anderson writes that in an age when journalists and the media have become entertainers, she has realized that it may now be time for entertainers to become journalists. For all the unrelenting sadness and despair of her show, if this is the future of journalism, then journalism is going to be a lot more entertaining than it has been lately. Good!
Perhaps Anderson’s next move should be to anchor a major network’s newscast to go up against the likes of Katie Couric. Like novelist Douglas Adams recognized a long time ago, there’s no reason why the end of the world can’t be appreciated for the spectacle that it is.
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