BAM Next Wave Festival
BAM Harvey Theater, Brooklyn, NY
“I’m gonna play a sound, and I want you to follow it with you mind.”
These words floated softly out of Laurie Anderson’s deep yet wispy, earthy, and harmonious voice. Although she was quoting a teacher from long ago, I held on to very word and anticipated whatever this noise might be....A sparkling * ding * resonated throughout the auditorium of BAM’s Harvey Theater. Within the 3 seconds that this playful, bell-like tone rang, I swear my mind followed it outside of the theater, across the sky, to the moon and back. In fact, every part of Laurie Anderson’s latest performance, “Delusion,” left me in a dream-like, drifting state; I felt accepting towards any small or great adventure my mind might travel during that evening.
Laurie Anderson can be described a performance artist, musician, and comedian, or actress, but perhaps the best word to describe her is a storyteller. Rather than just Laurie, the raven-voiced, wise, mother figure, we have Fenway Bergamont, the lighthearted, deep-voiced male character telling the audience stories, jokes, and moral tales. Anderson's male alter-ego, Bergamont, is created through a voice changer, and his deeper voice ends up sounding distorted and disturbing; his character and tone however is light and playful, and one may or may not feel more sympathetic to his words. Like a dream, Anderson (the performer herself, not the characters) floats in and out of stories, characters, and scenes – almost like chapters in a never-ending book. She/He speaks of archiving digitized music recordings into plants, of giving birth to her own rat terrier, and of Father Pierre, a ‘kind of New York art-world priest for lapsed believers’.
Many elements of her performances seem dated, with plenty of saxophone, fake snow, pink satin, and dramatic blue and red light filters, and at points I felt as if I was watching a well-produced PBS production from 1992. Yet all of these effects are sincere, and if Anderson embraces it, then the audience embraces it. The audience eventually drifts into her rhythm and accepts it. In fact, when the 90-minute performance came to the finale, I felt as though I was being shook awake from a deep sleep.
