Laurie Anderson's Homeland

In Part 3 of her magnum opus United States I-IV, Laurie Anderson states, "Listen, I've got a vision. I see myself as part of a long tradition of American humor. You know - Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig ....". For better or worse, Laurie Anderson has spent most of her career labeled as a Performance Artist - probably the only performance artist most people can name. In much the same way that Marcel Duchamp took an everyday object like a bicycle wheel and christened it art, the notion of performance art requires a re-evaluation of what constitutes art. Combining threads of humour, music, visual art, linguistics, ritual, technology, literature, story-telling and political commentary, Laurie Anderson has challenged perceptions to define an art of performance that is as entertaining as a circus of the mind. Since the 1970s, she has been an inventor (the tape-bow violin following John Cage's tape music, and the talking stick - a specialized MIDI controller), a sculptor, an author, a musician and recording artist, a film director (Home of the Brave), a television host (Alive from Off-Center) and NASA's first (and only) artist-in-residence. Along the way, Laurie Anderson has produced an astonishing series of performance pieces, the 4-hour United States I-IV - which spawned material for a series of recordings including the albums Big Science, Mr. Heartbreak and her "hit single" O Superman (for Massenet) - The End of the Moon (for NASA), and Moby Dick. Deeply affected by the 2001 attacks on her home city New York and deeply disturbed by the political evolution in the United States following, Laurie Anderson was moved to produce her most recent piece entitled Homeland which will be performed in a rare Vancouver appearance next Saturday October 18th at the Centre for the Performing Arts in Vancouver. The themes which Anderson explores with Homeland cover a panoply of contemporary issues, from the war and the media to America’s growing surveillance culture to global warming and the environment. The roots of the piece emerged in 2004; while making a film commissioned for the World Expo in Japan, Anderson began to contemplate the underlying meanings of the short stories that she was using in the work. One of the stories touched on losing things, or the feeling of losing things. “ ‘I knew I had lost something but I just couldn’t put my finger on it,’ was one of the lines in the story,” Anderson explains. “Like when you feel bereft and you don’t know whether it’s because you lost your keys or your job or because your grandfather just died,” she continues. “But I started to think about when I wrote that story and I remembered that it was when we began the invasion of Iraq. And what I’d lost was my country.” Anderson weaves that notion into Homeland’s thematic threads. Albeit thus far commercially unreleased (a Nonesuch release is scheduled for 2009), recorded performances of Homeland have been eagerly traded by fans who have noted the show's evolution in the last year and a half. Political commentary is an essential part of the performance and given the American election and the current economic crisis, I'd expect a wry perspective on the news of the day. Laurie plays the violin and keyboards with a variety of voices, and is joined by New York musicians Peter Scherer on keyboards (probably best known for his work with Arto Lindsay in the Ambitious Lovers and his work with Kip Hanrahan), Skuli Sverrisson on bass and guitar, Eyvind Kang on viola (an occasional visitor to Vancouver with Bill Frisell's and his own groups) and Korean cellist Okkyung Lee. See http://www.mundomundo.com for more details. "There's trouble ... There's trouble out at the mine ... There's trouble out at the mine ..." Post comments in the Jazz Forum