Stories from Homeland

Back in the day, Laurie Anderson was known as a “performance artist.” She’s long since outgrown that label, graduating to “artist”—a visionary, challenging, genre-crossing multi-media musician, composer, and writer who has earned both critical acclaim and popular success. Anderson returns to the Mondavi Center October 22, for her third appearance at Jackson Hall, with a new work called Homeland.

Laurie Anderson’s first work as a performance artist, in 1969, was a symphony played on car horns. In another memorable performance, she stood on a block of ice, wearing ice skates and playing violin. The piece ended when the ice melted. She first attracted notice outside the art world in 1981, when she had a fluke hit record with “O Superman,” which rose to the No. 2 spot on the British pop charts. Anderson has since put together an artistic resume unique in its scope and ambition.

Anderson serves as NASA’s only artist-in-residence, an experience that informed The End of the Moon, which she performed at the Mondavi Center in 2005. She won the prestigious Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize in 2007 for her “outstanding contribution to the beauty of the world and to humankind’s enjoyment and understanding of life.” Anderson directed and starred in a concert film, Home of the Brave, and is known for such albums as Big Science, Bright Red, Life on a String, Live in New York, Mister Heartbreak, and United States Live, and the multi-media presentations Songs and Stories from Moby Dick and O Zlozony/O Composite. Anderson composed the soundtracks for a pair of Spalding Gray films, Swimming to Cambodia and Monster in a Box. She hosted the PBS series Alive from Off-Center in the late 1980s and even wrote the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on the culture of New York.

Anderson toured Homeland as a work-in-progress in 2007 and earlier this year in Ireland, Australia, Switzerland, Italy, and Russia, as well as performances at home in New York City. She performed Homeland (with a four-piece backing band) for five nights at the Lincoln Center Festival in July and will have just completed touring the new work in Argentina, Chile, and Brazil when she brings it to the Mondavi Center.

Homeland is rooted in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. “Many years later we find ourselves living, in many ways, in a very different place,” Anderson says. “A lot of people have felt the same way I have—disoriented about a lot of things, in particular having to do with the war. So Homeland was about looking at contemporary culture through two filters, the filters of love and war.”

“I’m very fascinated by the element of stories. That’s kind of my medium. And during elections, elections are all about stories. We want to know whether the story is plausible or not, whether candidates are spinning stories about themselves or about the past or a possible future. I’m just trying to come at it from a bunch of different angles without being didactic. Nobody needs more didactic.”

When >

Wed • Oct 22, 2008 • 8:00 PM

Where >

Jackson Hall

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Series >

Masters of Our Time