Artistic residency with NASA leads to 'End of the Moon'
BY CLARKE BUSTARD
TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER
Sunday, October 17, 2004

THE END OF THE MOON
BY: Laurie Anderson AT: 7:30 p.m. tomorrow and Tuesday in Jepson
Theatre at UR's Modlin Center TICKETS: $5-$30 INFORMATION: (804)
289-8980

Laurie Anderson, the musician and performance artist, made her name in
the 1980s with "The United States" and "Home of the Brave," vast
multimedia cavalcades that went on tour with several 18-wheelers full
of props and equipment.

Her more recent performance pieces, such as "Happiness," which she
took on the road two years ago, and "The End of the Moon," the new
production Anderson will present tomorrow and Tuesday at the
University of Richmond, are billed as being more "low-tech."

What that really means is that they are more portable.

"Actually, there's more technology, more software, involved," Anderson
said during a recent stop on her "End of the Moon" tour. "You don't
see anything but a keyboard, a violin and a very tiny camera. Most of
it comes from inside a PowerBook.
Click Here.   

"At the rate the technology is progressing, I'm looking forward to the
day when I can store my show in the overhead compartment of a plane."

The 57-year-old artist, who made her way into the cultural avant-garde
in the'70s after studying music, sculpture and other visual arts,
developed the words and music of "The End of the Moon" from her
artistic residency with the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration, which runs through this year.

"NASA wasn't at all specific about what I would do in this residency,"
she said. "It was just, 'Give it a shot.' In some parts of NASA people
were pretty sarcastic about it - 'What's she going to do? Write a
poem?' I had to pretty much invent what I would do.

"What I found was that a lot of what goes on at NASA speaks very
clearly to our creative side. The research guidelines of a lot of
projects are aesthetic in the way they can be read. There's a
tradition of this, I learned, going back to Einstein, who rejected
some of his own theories because they weren't 'beautiful.'

"I could relate to that immediately," Anderson said. "I remembered my
time as a pre-med student studying chemistry and biology. I always
found it more interesting to make experiments turn out looking right,
with some kind of symmetry to them, than I was in dealing with awkward
truths."

Much of her residency has been devoted to "trying to figure out what
art and science have in common, and that takes you in a lot of
directions."

She meanders along some of the paths she takes in her account of
NASA. "The performance doesn't stick to a single subject. It's a
series of stories about beauty and dogs and war as well as the space
agency."

However scattershot it may seem, Anderson believes the production does
address the essence of NASA's work. "It's about making great leaps of
the imagination. The question you keep hearing is, 'What are we
looking for and why?'"

While she is identified with high-tech music and performance, Anderson
considers her art form "as ancient as Homer. I'm trying to tell
interesting stories in a melodic way. My ambition is to be a
troubadour with a plugged-in briefcase."

Her storytelling has advanced from an earlier "journalistic" approach
- the facts generously garnished with ironic humor - to what she calls
a "more literary, dreamier" use of language. Many of her narratives
come across "like song lyrics without the melodies," she said,
"following the rhythm of the reason."

Anderson faced some aesthetic choices in taking on the NASA residency:
Would she, like so many artists, view science through the lens of
science fiction? Would she musically evoke space through the
electronic cliches of "space music?"

To the former, she said: "I have a great appreciation for science
fiction, and sci-fi, or maybe applied sci-fi, describes a lot of what
NASA is doing."

As to spacey electronics, she's more ambivalent. "I've always played
my hopped-up electric violin because I like the sound. And the latest
high-tech instruments, from the theremin in the 1920s to the
software-driven keyboards of today, are always used to represent the
futuristic in music.

"I hope I'm not using machine-driven space cliches," she
said. "High-tech does not automatically equal 'spacey.'

"Why not human whistling? Depends on the whistling, of
course. . . . How do you musically represent a black hole?
Interpreting color is still a big mystery: What do those spectrum
numbers [read from the Hubble Space Telescope] mean, what are we
really seeing, and how do you translate it into sound?"

From her time at NASA, Anderson comes away "reassured. There are a lot
of incredible dreamers and fascinating theories there . . . a renewed
excitement about the possibilities of space exploration."

"I'm a fairly dark person in my perceptions, and that's reflected in
my observations of the space program. It's not all about excitement
and wonder."

Still, "I'd love to go up on a space mission, just as a passenger or
as some kind of participant. Do you think they could find a space for
an inept poet in residence?"

Contact Clarke Bustard at (804) 649-6362 or cbustard@timesdispatch.com

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