JADAR

★★★★☆

In the early 1980s, Anderson created the unprecedented multimedia epic United States Parts 1–4. In 2024, the year of a momentous US election, she completes this work with ARK: United States V, premiering at Factory International.

ARK: United States V is a live poem-monologue, visual, audio, AI-image assisted performance. The technology Anderson incorporates are plentiful, from music and visuals to a live Zoom call! It is a lot of things, about a lot of things, but essentially, as Anderson said, “It really is a story of time, just like everything else.”

I watched her drum-suit performance beforehand, and friends spoke highly of her contributions to music, namely creating new instruments and adding electronic sounds to our senses. Anderson’s skills in storytelling, visuals and humour were also on display in this show.

It is difficult to say what the show had in it except that some of the pieces were her old performances, namely the drum suit making an appearance, which I was really happy to see. A sort of skit-cum-parody of Anderson performing her old pieces on the speed of sperm was quite interesting. She has performed it before, I’m sure in the last century, and you can see in the older performances that her stage look and visuals were distinct to the performance I saw last night. Anderson, for sure, reworks her work, not to modernise it but to create another version of it.

The musical elements were plentiful and all amazing: Laurie on the violin, vocals, electronics and keyboard, Doug Wieselman on guitars, saxophone and wind, and Kenny Wollesen on percussion. By using elements of green screen and modulation, Anderson was creating varieties of tones, not just in music but the atmosphere of the show. Sacred Harp made a beautiful appearance singing songs to mark the end of the two intervals were beautiful additions to the show.

Her stories in the show, if connected by an idea, was the idea of what a human wanted versus what they received. An example to clarify is when Anderson spoke of her father; owning a horse business at 8 and being married at the age of 9. When Anderson looked further into her father’s childhood, she saw documents which relayed his travel to America, the death of his mother soon after, and her father being placed in a prison for orphan children.

Anderson speaks about the reality of her father, but playfully uses AI-generated images to show her father’s story to Anderson instead. We see very cute, AI-generated images of a young Swedish horse business-boy, a child marriage with all the imperfections that AI-generated images bring.

It was this storytelling, of what people had preferred, that Anderson visualised, made into song and sketch for us the audience, which you would realise is not the reality of the people whose story she explored. Anderson seems very interested in this idea of simulation of our own stories, stories which are already a departure from reality. As such, her music and visuals also edge on the verge of simulation in this way, slightly jarring, mostly exciting, and confirming the idea that we create our own realities, and they are sometimes not the reality we actually experience.

Anderson had the audience bewitched. She made us scream for 10 seconds and do Tai Chi at the end with her and Sacred Harp on stage. She spoke about the fear in which we live in and gave us three rules of living well (another story which has been performed before!): Don’t be afraid of anyone; Have a good bullshit detector and know how to use it; Be really tender. I really liked these three rules; they rang true.

Anderson uses her own work to inform her existing work, creating slight differences, variations which make it true for the time she performs it in. She explores in a few words, reality versus fiction. The little details that make her new performances different are quite valuable and make them different to her just repeating her work again.

And because of that, it is by nature hard to tell what was being said, except what literally was said. It is an un-meta but, perhaps, very meta, time-sensitive work, and yet, repeated again and again for Anderson speaks simple truths. As a first-timer taking part in a Laurie Anderson performance, I found it quite fun and easy, and oddly, sometimes, reminding me of literary and cultural theory. This show is accomplished, albeit a bit long.

Photo: Duncan Elliot

Ark: United States V runs at Aviva Studios (The Hall) until November 24.