Shouting Back

Standing for most of her performance in front of a fixed-image of a road receding into the distance, Laurie Anderson is a diminutive spiky-haired bard of the nineties. During a topical multimedia performance titled Voices From the Beyond last Friday at a packed Sanders Theater, Anderson endeared, entertained and decidedly challenged her audience.

Using some funky electronic voice filters, a synthesizer and some weird video techniques, Anderson proved once again her interest and allegiance to performance art. But it was her clear, sophisticated story telling style that transcended the other elements as the most consistently evocative and successful part of the performance.

Anderson covered a medley of topics ranging from Czechoslovakian cave writings and a new theme park in Barcelona she is designing with Brian Eno and Peter Gabriel to the Kennedy-Smith rape trial. Throughout Voices From the Beyond, however, she emphasized and repeatedly investigated ambitious topics of art, censorship, freedom and power. The Persian Gulf War and U.S. politics were the focus of her concern.

Her affable manner and eloquent story telling make her a pleasure to listen to even when she discusses unpleasant subjects such as suicides of Vietnam veterans, the war in the Gulf and issues of control and power surrounding women in America. Her use of an electronically deepened voice to imitate Reagan is at once funny and disturbing--like Reagan himself. A comic video interlude in which she appears as a freaky video dwarf reveals her light-heartedness and willingness to have fun. Anderson is not afraid to laugh at herself, but she maintains a serious impassioned monologue.

Anderson was ruthless in her analysis of American traits and flaws. Again and again, she cited examples of American ignorance, hatred, violence and selfishness. Her performance could have been an angry diatribe, or sour polemic, but it was not. Instead it became all the more effective for the endearing, rousing honesty which was embodied in her forthright, quirky style.

Anderson discussed art often in her performance, referring to the NEA controversy and the disappearance of the avant-garde. She jokingly speculated about a hypothetical Museum of Recent Art, bemoaning the difficulty in defining the word "modern" in a world where time is measured in split-second sound bytes and MTV video flashes.

In a Learning From Performers discussion sponsored by the Office for the Arts earlier the same day, Anderson discussed art with Harvard undergraduates. She emphasized the role of fear in her art; fear became a major component of her performance, both in the audience's forced self-inspection and in Anderson's own self-referentiality. When asked about sacrificing artistic integrity for popularity, Anderson replied that the artist should create something he or she believes in and stick with it. Her strong conviction in the value of personal conception and self-definition was certainly mirrored in her outspoken performance.

Voice From the Beyond represents a move away from her more musically-oriented efforts, like Home of the Brave and Strange Angels. Her Sanders Theatre performance relies on something more subtle and elusive than big synthesized sound. Anderson must enthrall the audience (for the most part) with her own insight and verbal acuity. For the most part she succeeds in this ambitious enterprise. Voices continually refers to the meaning of the future--one can't help but wonder what the future will mean for innovative Laurie Anderson.