Laurie Anderson visiting BU
Laurie Anderson will be at BU with a talk/performance and book signing at 7 pm on Thursday, February 7th at the Tsai Performance Center. There are only a few seats left! You can RSVP HERE. Be sure you are clicking the BU registration vs. the community one.
“The world is made of stories and as stories escalate and get shorter and shorter until they’re ten word tweets and as our sense of reality continues to shred, we see that this is not a political situation, it’s an existential one-” “And we suddenly see: we’re drowning in our own stories.” ~ Laurie Anderson
Laurie Anderson’s new book “All the Things I Lost in the Flood” is a series of essays about stories and language. In celebration of the publication of the book (released by Rizzoli in February ‘18) the artist will present a limited number of performances. The performance All the Things I Lost in the Flood is a reading and performance of the texts as well as visual images. It includes a discussion of her iconic work with voice, electronics, codes, narrative styles and digital language. The evening also includes accounts of many of the artist’s projects, operas, installations, and inventions as well as an inside look at the artist’s methods, strategies, failures, and Plan B’s. A book about performance comes to life again as a performance.
Laurie Anderson (born June 5, 1947) is an American avant-garde artist, composer, musician and film director whose work spans performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects. Initially trained in violin and sculpting, Anderson pursued a variety of performance art projects in New York during the 1970s, making particular use of language, technology, and visual imagery. She became widely more known outside the art world in 1981 when her single “O Superman” reached number two on the UK pop charts. She also starred in and directed the 1986 concert film Home of the Brave.
Anderson is a pioneer in electronic music and has invented several devices that she has used in her recordings and performance art shows. In 1977, she created a tape-bow violin that uses recorded magnetic tape on the bow instead of horsehair and a magnetic tape head in the bridge. In the late 1990s, she developed a talking stick, a six-foot (1.8 m) long baton-like MIDI controller that can access and replicate sounds.
Anderson started dating Lou Reed in 1992, and was married to him from 2008 until his death in 2013.