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Aviva Studios, ManchesterContemplating a world of catastrophe and collapse, the veteran artist’s new three-hour show, though much too long and diffuse, has moments of poignancy – and joyThe world premiere of Laurie Anderson’s new three-hour multimedia extravaganza begins with a sparkling globe spinning on a big screen like a Christmas tree bauble. Its surroundings are less jolly: a mushroom cloud, a raincloud soon surrounded by thunder, and a low, disturbing drone.
Weaving together music, storytelling, film, animation, a local choir and more, Ark: United States V explores, says its press bumf, “what has brought us here and how much time do we have left”. Its scheduling, just after Donald Trump’s potential election victory, one assumes, was not a coincidence.
It’s also a follow-up. United States I-IV debuted at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in February 1983, where Anderson, then 35, explored life in Ronald Reagan’s America. In two parts split over consecutive nights, it was a similar mix of forms and styles, when climate change was a new-ish kid on the block and the cold war was frosty. Things are arguably chillier now.
That production included her eerie, eight-minute-plus masterpiece O Superman – a surprise No 2 hit in the UK in late 1981 after the support of Radio 1 DJ John Peel, which led to an eight-album deal with Warner Bros. Meshing together the familiarity of a phone call from mother with the failed attempt to rescue US hostages in Tehran in early 1980, she told 60 Minutes presenter Anderson Cooper in 2022, it was a song about how “technology cannot save you”. Recently, funnily enough, it’s had a revival on TikTok.O Superman doesn’t feature tonight, although other songs and elements of Anderson’s past do, including her arresting 1982 track Walking and Falling. She also begins the show wearing headlamp-lit glasses, just as she ended Part IV more than four decades ago. Continue reading...