A moving experience

In the early eighties, I put “O Superman” on my answering machine.

People started calling—not to leave a message, but simply to listen. They would hang up without saying anything, then pass my number on to their friends. Soon, people I didn’t know were calling just to hear Laurie Anderson’s voice coming through the answering machine:

Hi. I’m not home right now.
But if you wanna leave a message,
Just start talking at the sound of the tone.

It was a strange and intimate form of performance. The caller was alone, perhaps standing in a hallway or sitting in a kitchen, listening to a recording intended for someone else. No stage, no lighting, no shared physical space—only a voice vibrating through copper wire, setting off a resonance in an isolated listener’s nervous system.

Long before every niche obsession became instantly available online, that shared, invisible thread of sound made the world, as Laurie Anderson is fond of saying, “a strange and wonderful place.” Her voice had entered my home and then, through the answering machine and the far-reaching tangle of wires it connected to, traveled into the homes of people I didn’t even know.

Over the decades that followed, catching her in person always meant a pilgrimage — the Herbst in San Francisco, the Paradiso in Amsterdam, Lincoln Center in New York. So when I drove down the street a few weeks ago and saw her name glowing on the Rio Theatre marquee, I was stunned. She wasn’t an ocean or an interstate away; she was right here in town.

I was so excited that I pulled into a parking lot and checked. The concert hadn’t sold out yet.

This past Saturday night, I saw her and Sex Mob perform Republic of Love.

The concert — a retrospective journey through 40+ years of Laurie Anderson’s extraordinary body of work — lasted nearly three hours without an intermission. (In her first Norton Lecture at Harvard, she said beginnings and endings were the hardest for her, and an intermission would require two of each.) The show included familiar pieces, remembered phrases and quotations, artwork she and others made, computer-generated images, sounds, stories, and songs. Nothing about it felt like a museum display or a reenactment of the past. It was alive. The earlier work is still moving, still changing, still relevant, maybe even more so.

Laurie is often described as a performance artist or multimedia artist. More recently, she has called herself a storyteller. I love that shift—not because one description replaces the other, but because both descriptions reveal something essential about her work. She works across media and incorporates all kinds of technology, moving between states of experience: humor and grief, memory and dream, the personal and the political, the ordinary and the cosmic.

You might be asking: Why am I writing about her?

Because beneath all the technology, stories, and spectacle, her work has always been an inquiry into what it means to be embodied. Laurie Anderson’s performances have always been profoundly physical, even when she is standing nearly still.

• One of her earliest songs, written in 1977 for gun-obsessed artist Chris Burden, was called “It’s Not The Bullet That Kills You - It’s The Hole.”
  
• When she plays one of the outfits she created like it’s a drum, her body becomes the instrument.
  
• When she alters her voice electronically, she is not merely creating a special effect. She is asking (and getting us to question): Who is speaking? How does a voice constitute a self? What happens to our self-image when the feedback loop is split and the familiar voice becomes strange? What happens when we extend the body’s boundaries through technology?

Though she is often cited for her use of computing and electronic equipment, experiencing Laurie Anderson perform makes you realize her technology has never been an escape from the body; it amplifies it. Movement and embodied experience are not accessories or side dishes. They play a crucial part in her perspective and performance. This is perhaps most evident in her embrace of Tai Chi, which her late husband, Lou Reed — founder of the Velvet Underground and writer of “Walk on the Wild Side” — introduced her to and which she has continued to advocate for since his death.

Often described as meditation in motion, Tai Chi shares so much with Moshe’s method, in particular, and somatics, in general. Each movement flows into the next. Nothing is held in isolation. Weight shifts. Directions change. Action is organized by intention. You move from your center.

Last Saturday’s concert didn’t end with Laurie Anderson asking the audience to clap their hands or join in on a song. Instead, she finished her encore by inviting the six hundred or so of us in the audience to join her in a Tai Chi sequence.

Moving with everyone else in a moment of communal kinesthetic resonance, tears moistening my eyes, I thought, “Now that’s a moving experience.”