Have you felt like screaming lately? Here’s your chance: Laurie Anderson has the entire audience at Factory International scream for 15 seconds, in tribute to Yoko Ono’s three-minute yowl when asked in 2016 how she felt about Trump’s victory. More soothingly, at the end we’re invited to stand and do t’ai chi, in tribute to Anderson’s late husband Lou Reed’s favourite sequence.
It’s testament to the expansive, irrefusable spirit of Anderson — the live art pioneer perhaps still best known for her leftfield 1981 hit O Superman — that we all do whatever she asks. She’s an utterly charming, sprite-like performer, impish and very funny. Which she needs to be, to lead us through this sprawling, indefinable show: a mix of storytelling, memoir, song, live music, AI experiments, and cinematic, digital and hand-drawn imagery. At well over three hours, it’s far too long and it’s also a delight.
ARK expands on work from across Anderson’s career, in particular her 1982 multimedia performances United States I-IV. The conceit is that the iCloud has broken and “all the relationships between things and their representations are severed … suddenly you’re in a swirl”.
She claims the show will follow a wild plot about time running out on America, featuring Biblical floods and an “ark-chive” storing DNA, with video footage of the artist Ai Weiwei as Old Testament God (“Yahweh Wei”) and the musician Anohni as the Buddha. Elon Musk, rendered in comic-strip form, is the devil.
But she quickly abandons this tantalising narrative, and embraces the swirl: instead ARK waltzes dreamily through Anderson’s life, and the ever-shifting preoccupations of her big, interesting brain. These include nuclear war, climate disaster, the cosmos, the speed of sperm, and what happens if you get AI to write the Bible in the style of Anderson.
There are profound musings on existence, and there’s top-tier silliness; there’s also a great soundtrack from Sexmob, live percussion from Kenny Wollesen, brass and woodwind from Doug Wieselman, and the muscular choral singing of a local Sacred Harp group.
At 77, Anderson is one of those performers who has attained a certain special quality: a distinctly spiritual wisdom seems to radiate from her. As a whole, ARK is indulgently meandering. But in its best moments — I’m thinking particularly of the first-half closer, a gloriously full-hearted, full-throated performance of Lou Reed’s Junior Dad with the Sacred Harp singers — it is transcendental.
★★★★☆
200min
To Nov 24, factoryinternational.org