LAURIE ANDERSON in Macau | Giving people a sense of freedom

American performing artist Laurie Anderson hopes that her art will give people a sense of freedom. “I am an artist because I want to be free,” she said in an open discussion held a day ahead of her show last Saturday. In “The Language of the Future,” her performance in Macau’s 28th International Music Festival, the artist drew on the idea of the impact of time and memory on reality.
“It’s a work about how to describe time (…) stories about time, perception and memory. The future, not as science fiction, but as the future tense of the language, [about] our expectations. Expectations and regrets, and the flaws of history, are some of the themes,” Anderson told reporters after the open discussion.
She likened it to  “a collection of stories.” It is a show in which she’s the DJ, and where a lot of sounds come out, almost like a film soundtrack, she said, with occasional improvisations: “very cinematic” and “quite wordy,” with a lot of subtitles. “I really enjoyed creating these images with words,” she said.
The Guardian describes Anderson, 67, as a “performer, composer, artist and all-round superstar of New York’s downtown avant-garde.”
As an artist, she has always remained faithful to the experimental camp, sometimes spending up to years creating multimedia performances, featuring songs about themes as varied as democracy, nuclear weapons, or even a simple post office.
But where did this interest in electronics, for instance, first arise? Anderson lived in a Manhattan street, she recalled, that was filled with old electronics. She loved to look through all the stuff and see how she could make things work. “You do a lot of things because you’re close to that stuff,” she recognized. Anderson says she loves doing physical things, and things with her hands. “I like electronics because it was available, it’s fast and energetic.” Her attraction to electronics was all about speed.
Anderson was born in the American Midwest in 1947 and moved to New York in the late 1960s. She’s known for incorporating multimedia in her art. She plays the violin and the keyboards. She sings as well, always experimenting and creating different voices. In the open discussion last Friday, asked about her peculiar voice, she said: “most of my brothers and sisters sound most like me. I use filters (…) changing the voice is thrilling to me, [it’s like] you become a different person (…)”
She said her life improved significantly five years ago, after she decided not to ever read or hear anything about her work. “And I haven’t. I have no idea what people say. I just realized it never really helped me. If it was a good review I would feel I’d need to do well in the next one (…) it was always discouraging no matter what,” she recalled.
Performing in Macau for the first time, her first impressions of the city were mostly about Macau’s buildings and narrow streets. While remarking that as a visitor, she often has little time to see attractions, Laurie Anderson was impressed by the imaginative shapes of Macau’s buildings.
“The very first thing you see is the incredible shapes of the buildings, it’s a museum of skyscrapers.”
Laurie Anderson, widow of recently deceased musician Lou Reed, performed on Saturday at Mount Fortress, under the lighting design of Brian Scott – a show included in Macau’s 28th International Music Festival program.

supporting occupy central

Although artist Laurie Anderson says that back in the United States, recent Ebola cases have eclipsed the ongoing incidents in Hong Kong, she confirmed ahead of her show last Friday her awareness of the movement and supports Hong Kong’s call for democracy. “Anytime students are questioning things, and demanding their freedom to know things, it’s a great and wonderful situation,” she emphasised. Recalling that she was also once a student radical, the artist said she appreciated the desire among youths to challenge existing political conditions and to engage politically. According to the Guardian, she supported the Occupy Wall Street movement against social and economic inequality back in 2011 and credited it with giving her work a new impetus.