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| "United States I-IV," 1983. Eight hour, multimedia performance; premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York. |
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“United States I-IV”
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Laurie Anderson began
composing United States in 1979, nearly four years before its debut
performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York. An eight
hour production in four parts - Transportation, Politics, Money,
and Love - the work is modeled after the structure of a classical
opera. The portrait of a technological society and its people, Anderson’s
“talking opera” portrays a subject which is constantly
changing or on the move. Featured in the work are the themes of
driving and flying cross-country. Lush with geographical references
and imagery, Anderson’s song and stories were complimented
by a complex, multimedia stage production consisting of thousands of
slides
and film clips. Projected over and behind the performers were, among
other things, images of maps, wild animals, astronauts, and
electrical
equipment. Anderson even devised a makeshift hologram, created
by rapidly waving a violin bow in the light cast by a slide projector.
Pairing violin and voice with electronic synthesizers and techno-pop
drum beats, the sound of the opera matches Anderson’s handling
of images and subject matter. Dreams, Bible stories and images of
nature are complimented by radio dials, airports, and outerspace.
In a striking image, performers held
violins
in front of their faces producing large, alien-like shadows on a
translucent screen. Playful and sharp-witted, Anderson’s United
States combines familiar objects, images, and situations to produce
an uncanny, evocative performance.
An example of the way in which Anderson transforms an everyday occurrence
into something strange can be found with the song “Language
is a Virus.” Dedicated to the Beat writer William Burroughs
who coined the phrase “language is a virus from outer space,”
Anderson’s song scrutinizes everyday examples of language-use
from pain cries to performances to overdubbed Japanese films. Remarking
in an interview that “it’s a strange thing for an author
to say that language is a disease communicable by the mouth,”
Anderson’s song relates a similar terror of communication.
The song concludes with Anderson describing a group of traveling
salesmen who promise her a world connected by a vast network of
technology, resembling something like a string of Christmas lights.
Wary of the what the salesmen celebrate, from “Neurological
Bonding” to “Laser Discs,” Anderson pleads with them,
singing “Count me out. You gotta count me out.” While
“Language is a Virus” and other songs and stories from
United States bemoan the ever-increasing dependence of Americans
on technology, each song is marked by Anderson’s sense of irony
and humor. In the end, United States is the story of a society navigating
the waves of digital innovation to a distant utopia on the horizon.
Seeing technology as a tool which can amplify or enlarge, Anderson’s
opera utilizes such technologies to reach out to her audience. |
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