Laurie Anderson: ARK: United States V

The septuagenarian artist’s world premiere of Ark: United States V, at Manchester’s Aviva Studios, was a journey of visual, verbal and musical storytelling exploring the artist’s and the US’s history

Laurie Anderson, Ark: United States V, Aviva Studios, Manchester, 12 – 24 November 2024. Photo: Duncan Elliott.

Aviva Studios, Manchester
12 – 24 November 2024

by VERONICA SIMPSON

Atomic annihilation, climate catastrophe, floods, fires, migration, elections, misinformation, artificial intelligence (AI) and cloning, it was all there. Ark: United States V concludes a series, United States I – IV, that the multimedia artist Laurie Anderson (b1947, Chicago) began in 1983. Its first iteration was an eight-hour durational performance piece, spread over two nights, in four parts, titled Transportation, Politics, Money and Love. With this fifth part, I had braced myself for something bleak, thanks to publicity that had promised “a show about fear, disaster, preservation, invention, love and escape – from the biblical flood to current natural disasters and beyond”. Maybe I had hoped for an excoriating examination of the great American Dream as it crashes and burns in a world where truth no longer matters and everything – minds, money, myths – can be manipulated by the handful of people controlling the tech that powers our lives. The publicity also billed this as an examination of “what has brought us here, and how much time do we have left”, but I would be surprised if anyone came out of this often-surreal mashup of film, CGI graphics, AI-generated imagery, chalk drawings, beat poetry, shaggy-dog stories, songs and free range jazz/ambient soundtrack any the wiser as to how we navigate our way through this mess. For all that Anderson is a phenomenal and radical thinker – former artist in residence at Nasa, occasional composer of music for car horns as well as chimpanzees – there are times when everyone benefits from a good editor.

Laurie Anderson, Ark: United States V, Aviva Studios, Manchester, 12 – 24 November 2024. Photo: Duncan Elliott.

For Ark I-IV, the key image was apparently a map of the US divided into four time zones. In V, the perspective had expanded, and the key image was the globe. To a background of clanging, discordant, bell-like sounds – sounding the alarm? – we arrived in Aviva Studios’ vast hall to see a rotating Earth, sparkling like a glitterball, projected on the rear of the set. There were sculptures roughly in the form of clouds hovering either side of the stage, made from what looked like crumpled paper. The one on the left had a trunk, also made from the same material. And throughout the show, undulating light effects across these “clouds” made a convincing display of movement, flow and animation. An assortment of microphones, stands and instruments spread across the stage, a drum kit to the right. The floor sparkled with refracted light. This monochrome, moody set and soundtrack created an atmosphere of quiet menace. But Anderson was enjoying herself too much to spend time being menacing.

Laurie Anderson, Ark: United States V, Aviva Studios, Manchester, 12 – 24 November 2024. Photo: Duncan Elliott.

After acknowledging the biblical references of the Ark storyline – the end of days, a flight from disaster – Anderson shared her initial inspiration of getting Ai Weiwei to play God, or Yahweh, and musician/artist Anohni (formerly known as Antony of Antony and the Johnsons) to play Buddha. As she talked, their images drifted across the screen, looking cerebral and other worldly. Elon Musk (on film) made a brief cameo as the devil, a moment that got a big laugh. There may have been an intention to make something of these characters through the show, but they pretty much vanished after this point, apart from Ai. Anderson immediately disappeared down one of many conversational side alleys as she told us of the time she spent with him at his home and studio in Portugal, filming the artist for this show, while the resulting footage played on the screen behind her. We saw him wandering, shirtless along a tree-lined path; we saw him shaving his head, then lying down in an earthy hollow for a nap. He re-emerged, at other points in the evening, white-suited, strolling casually or grandly across the screen, or staring into the camera, inscrutable. Underpinned by Anderson’s mellow, midwestern drawl – occasionally and effectively electronically distorted to play different characters (God, Trump, a TikTok troll) – this anecdote exemplified the meandering rhythm of stories she had threaded together, often absorbing but occasionally soporific, as one flowed into the next. It felt like being lulled into that meditative state in childhood when told a long and rambling fairytale, albeit a dark one, with many twists and turns, and no clear narrative arc.

Laurie Anderson, Ark: United States V, Aviva Studios, Manchester, 12 – 24 November 2024. Photo: Duncan Elliott.

At points during the show, Anderson linked her personal history into moments of significance from the last century. She mentioned her grandmother, for example, who thought she could speak in tongues – “it sounded like Hungarian to me,” said Anderson, whose humorous asides often brought laughter to the aisles. Post-Hiroshima, her grandmother went to Japan to spread the Christian word about fire, eternal damnation and burning cities. “They knew what that looked like,” Anderson deadpanned.

This was the tone through most of the show – droll, playful. The soundscape, however, was textured and interesting. There was layering and looping of electronics but mostly we were entertained by Anderson’s voice, her adapted/customised violin, some keyboards, and two longstanding associates from the band Sexmob (who are also accompanying her on her current world tour, X=X, a kind of greatest hits show, from which quite a few of the elements of this show have been borrowed). Doug Wieselman is on guitar, flute, sax and clarinet and Kenny Wollesen is on drums and percussion.

Laurie Anderson, Ark: United States V, Aviva Studios, Manchester, 12 – 24 November 2024. Photo: Duncan Elliott.

The only dramatic moment in the first half occurred at the end, when a troupe of shape note singers (Manchester’s Sacred Harp singers) filed on to the stage and blasted out a primal, half-sung, half-shouted song, each vocalist flapping one arm up and down to keep time with the music. This is apparently traditional within the shape note community – representing the lack of hierarchy, everyone keeps time – but in this surreal storyline, I could not help thinking of those weird “Good luck” golden cat ornaments. And it turned out to be lucky for us, the audience, as it signified lights up and time for a break … an interval in which the singers blasted out more shouty songs in the foyer.

Over the hubbub in the bar, I overheard one Mancunian man say: “I’m enjoying it, but I’m not getting any emotional connection.” I was in agreement at this point.

Things did get darker, and more arresting in the second half, which opened with visuals across screen and stage that communicated decay and fragmentation. The action started with a bang. Or more accurately, the drummer appeared as a one-man band or marching band performer, with a large drum adorned with various percussive elements strapped to his front, which he banged for all he was worth. On the main screen, we saw a digital representation of an atomic bomb going off. I realised later that the cloud on the right of the stage had transformed into a mushroom cloud, with that distinctive stem.

Laurie Anderson, Ark: United States V, Aviva Studios, Manchester, 12 – 24 November 2024. Photo: Duncan Elliott.

When Anderson arrived, we were presented with a splayed map of the world, with the US in the centre. The rest of the world had been pushed off to either side. This is the world map she grew up with, Anderson told us. She pointed to two islands that appear as tiny specks on the margins. As a child, she found herself wondering “who lives on these tiny little islands?” She was told: “Oh, there are kings and queens, and they love tea, they have beautiful gardens … they are very reserved, formal. So, I always got Japan and England mixed up, even years later.” Then the narrative shifts to 1962 and the Cuban missile crisis. “The crisis lasted eight days. In that time everyone went a bit crazy … I remember looking in the mirror and thinking: I’m only 15 and I’ve already died. So … that’s what it’s like to disappear, I thought.”

Laurie Anderson, Ark: United States V, Aviva Studios, Manchester, 12 – 24 November 2024. Photo: Duncan Elliott.

Anderson drew on another member of her family to share with us some fun she had conjured using AI. Her grandfather, she told us, always claimed he came from Sweden at the age of eight, ran his own horse-trading business from age nine, and was married by 10. Apparently, neither she nor her relatives challenged this extraordinary fabrication. But for the fun of it, Anderson showed us how – with the help of AI – she put together a slideshow of images that could tell this story, quite plausibly (if you set aside his impossible age), but to often hilarious effect.

Anderson did later look into her grandfather’s history and discovered that he came over from Sweden with his mother, who died, and he ended up in a remand home and then a prison – one that was later immortalised in a song by Bob Dylan. She played that song, and thanked Dylan for his brilliance and his understanding of the underdog.

Anderson also shared that, across the internet, there was a lot of imagery before the US election about guns and flags, to accompany the rhetoric around migrants storming the borders carrying guns, knives and planning to eat people’s pets. On the screen, accompanying footage appeared of people holding guns and flags aloft in triumph after the election result – so fresh in our minds. She let these images linger for a while, presumably so it would hit home how easily we are manipulated when people know our trigger points.

Laurie Anderson, Ark: United States V, Aviva Studios, Manchester, 12 – 24 November 2024. Photo: Duncan Elliott.

There was a more viscerally apocalyptic section towards the end, when the stage appeared to have been flooded. The effect was convincing – it looked at times as if the stage and its inhabitants were floating, even tilting (I found myself checking the level of the stage against the seats in front of me – had anything shifted? No, they were as they were to begin with). Towards the end of this section, Anderson related – in words and letters scrawled across the screen – a saying, allegedly from the Bible, that if God failed to achieve his objectives with water (the great flood), he would do so with fire. At this point, balls of fire unfurled towards us on the screen, the whole stage bathed in flickering simulated flame.

The stage set really came into its own in this second half. The light playing across these tree/cloud/atom bombs was truly spectacular. The colours shifting across them ranged from ethereal to post-nuclear. In the final five minutes, the screen turned into a display of creeping algae or fruiting mycelium, as Anderson told us that scientists have now identified mushrooms that can consume plastic. Was this a note of optimism? Who can say. She invited the Sacred Harp singers back on stage then she invited us to perform some tai chi with her (the whole audience stood, delighted to be moving after so long in their seats) and left us with two allegedly Buddhist tropes (my 14-year studies of Buddhist philosophy have never unearthed such sentiments). One was that you should “try feeling sad without actually being sad” – the message being that the world has too much sadness in it, we can’t allow ourselves to wallow. The second Buddhist bon mot? Imagine this with Anderson’s deadpan delivery: “To have a really … really … really …  good time.” The audience cheered. And she vanished.

Although Factory International made a huge song and dance about commissioning this work, and its longstanding relationship with Anderson – which goes back to 2017, when she helped to lay the foundation stone of this OMA-designed performance supershed, the show delivered much less of a definitive artwork than was promised. We were even informed that Ark: V is “the culmination of Laurie Anderson’s multifaceted journey”. I wouldn’t call it that. For starters, this elfin, sprightly figure, at 77, seemed to have plenty of energy and inventiveness left in her. She strolled and skipped around the stage, she wielded her instruments – her customised violin, her keyboard, and above all that voice – with skill and dexterity, and she seemed supple and strong as she demonstrated the tai chi sequence apparently taught to her by her beloved husband, Lou Reed, who died in 2013.

If I were Factory International, I would feel a little miffed that this “world premiere” included several elements taken from her aforementioned X=X tour, including Lou Reed singing Metallica’s Junior Dad song, with Reed’s recorded voice and a ghostly film of his face appearing on screen. An anecdote about Yoko Ono screaming for 10 seconds, when she heard Trump was elected the first time, cropped up, too, and Anderson also got the audience to scream with her to demonstrate what that sounds like (surprisingly fun). A gloomy rendition of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, plus the tai chi are also in the X=X tour. Does it matter? I think it does. There was just too much of everything, spread out over its three-hour duration. It became a collaged quilt of impressions rather than a compelling portrait of a country or an era. And it’s a shame; there is still so much originality left in this category-defying artist, as the recent Amelia album testifies: a fascinating sonic imagining of Amelia Earhart’s last, fatal flight that builds, in a slowly escalating landscape of fractured radio signals and thrumming engines to its fatal climax. I suspect, with some inspired editing, Anderson could have done a lot more here with a lot less.