Music
Laurie Anderson
Nov. 17 at Belmont University’s Massey Performing Arts CenterWho would have thought that after 25 years Laurie Anderson would become adept at rattling off one-liners? She’s no Bob Hope, but with her current performance vehicle, The End of the Moon, Anderson tapped the seeming absurdity of her appointment as NASA’s first artist-in-residence for all it was worth last Thursday night. Throughout her performance in Belmont’s Massey Hall, Anderson spun off her stories with deadpan irony and offered her destabilizing reflections on public and private life. Try to imagine local TV meteorologist Nancy Van Camp forecasting the end of the world in placid tones and never letting down her smile.
Anderson maintained this deceptively beaming persona while relating her NASA appointment as something of a postmodern Trojan horse, delivering her critique of the military-industrial complex even after she had been temporarily ensconced within it. Her typically wry observations touched on such matters as the evolution of space suit design from Hulk-like alien forms to sleek, ripped, anatomically correct body armor that can enable exponential increases in arm strength while also creating fractures and providing splints.
Despite the apocalyptic overtones of her show’s title, Anderson didn’t mine Frankensteinian territory with her performance. Even her brief remarks on the Challenger catastrophe meandered into a rather tame elegy on the mildly disturbing effects of fragments landing in suburban swimming pools and being collected and reassembled by color-sensitive NASA technicians who lack any larger sense of vision. Anderson’s understated anecdotes quietly suggested that the monstrosities of advanced civilization and its power-mongering fantasies were let out of the bag a long time ago—and that they inhabit seemingly benign forms everywhere around us.
The real-world sci-fi motif of her loosely assembled performance allowed Anderson to plunge into her most comfortable territory—fanciful, mildly satiric ruminations. What if sports games on the moon meant that it would take a very, very long time for an airborne ball to come down? What if each new generation of nano-technology yielded smaller and swifter interplanetary vehicles that could pass their figurative grandparents on the highway to Mars, peering upside down with a grotesquely enlarged, enigmatic eye? Is the vision of otherworldly conquest simply curious, cruelly predatory or entirely bewildered? It might take as long as the next Voyager mission before some of Anderson’s stories return to the gravitational field, but they were interwoven in angular and recursive ways that produced a silent shock of recognition.
The most poignant anecdote of the evening began with Anderson telling of her need to escape her Manhattan neighborhood, which was continually under surveillance after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Once out West in a desert with her terrier, she noticed vultures hovering near her dog, only to correct themselves when they saw it was no rabbit. This seeming moment of relief, however, morphed into one of internalized horror when Anderson observed a parallel change in her dog’s field of vision: he would now have to look upward, not simply on ground level, to defend himself against attacks, just like the New Yorkers after 9/11 whom Anderson thought she’d left far behind.
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