Laurie Anderson’s DELUSION is an engaging multimedia examination of the personal and the political (photo by Leland Brewster)
Pace University
Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts
3 Spruce St. between Park Row & Gold St.
March 9-10, $30-$65, 7:30
www.pace.edu
www.laurieanderson.com
Examining the twenty years of her life she has spent sleeping, Laurie Anderson’s Delusion, playing this weekend at Pace’s Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts, consists of approximately twenty short mystery plays that move smoothly between the personal and the poltical, an intimate multimedia work about dreams and the state of the nation. Commissioned for the 2010 Vancouver Cultural Olympiad, Delusion features some of Anderson’s sharpest writing in years, performed in her unique talk-singing style either as herself or as deep-voiced alter ego Fenway Bergamot. Anderson glides between several microphones on a stage that includes video projections on a loveseat, shredded paper, a small scrim, and a large screen in back, depicting leaves flying in the wind, smoke drifting endlessly, a chalkboard filled with hard-to-decipher words and images, moonscapes, a child witnessing her mother’s death, and giant live shots of Anderson herself, playing her specially made violin. When we saw the show at BAM in September 2010, Anderson was joined by Colin Stetson on bass saxophone and Eyvind King on a more traditional violin, both men primarily seen in silhouette, with Anderson, dressed in her trademark white shirt and thin black tie, telling jokes and stories about age, memory, Iceland, nineteenth-century Russian space theorist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, punctuation, and her own heritage. The centerpiece of the show is “Another Day in America,” from Anderson’s 2010 album, Homeland; “And so finally here we are, at the beginning of a whole new era, the start of a brand new world,” she sings as Bergamot. “And now what? How do we start? How do we begin again? . . . And so which way do we go?” Throughout the ninety-minute performance, Anderson was warmer and friendlier than ever, filled with charm and good humor, making strong eye contact with the audience as she delved into fascinating topics with a wink and a knowing smile.