Laurie Anderson. Photo courtesy the Artist
When Laurie Anderson performed The Language of the Future a couple of years ago, she threw in shout-outs to whistleblower Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks honcho Julian Assange—a perfect confluence of her career-long fixations on technology, communication, and what it means to be American.
Since the 1980s, Anderson has been a wry, subversive, weirdly astute artist who mixes experimental audacity with deceptive simplicity and occasional strains of pop beauty. This time out she plays the Fitzgerald, and I’m hoping her strangely groovy cerebral stew will mingle nicely with all of the ghosts there.
The show (co-presented with the Walker and MPR) is part of the Liquid Music season; now until summer the series presents genre-straddling highlights that defy the idea that contemporary music is spinning its wheels (the offerings are neither classical nor pop, really, showing that these distinctions are somewhat arbitrary): the live graphic novel (What? Must see!) Nufonia Must Fall; a hip-hop/classical match-up featuring poet Saul Williams; and the multimedia acid-folk-indie mix of singer-songwriter Devendra Banhart. Because art needn’t ever feel like homework.
Laurie Anderson
Fitzgerald Theater
March 19
liquidmusicseries.org
