In the Belly of the Beast

NEW YORK —  Laurie Anderson’s spartan studio sits on the western lip of Lower Manhattan, where Canal Street opens into the Hudson River. Beyond the insulated silence of her white-walled rooms, derricks groan, drills pound and traffic grinds slowly into the mouth of the Holland Tunnel. Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” begins somewhere in the neighborhood--in “your insular city of Manhattoes, belted round by wharves”--before beginning its great ocean trek. Anderson is a performance artist who has spent two decades in the nurturing hubbub of SoHo, looking south toward the Atlantic emptiness and across the river at her--and Melville’s--limitless subject: America. And it is from here, in her command center alive with electronics, that Anderson has launched her own expedition in search of Melville’s giant, spouting book.

Anderson’s new multimedia show, “Songs and Stories From ‘Moby-Dick’ ” arrives at UCLA this week. It is an opera as music video, full of stark, haunting songs and melting, allusive imagery. It’s been sanded, reshaped and whittled down over the course of a zigzagging, intermittent tour that began inauspiciously last spring, when Tom Nelis, the actor playing the one-legged Captain Ahab, tumbled off the stage in Philadelphia, shattering his ankle.

“That was one of the worst moments of my life: hearing that thud of someone falling into the pit,” Anderson says, eyes widening at the memory. “But we did a show that night, without him. I read his lines myself.” She pauses, adding with a guilty grin: “I kind of like going to shows like that, where the unexpected happens.”

“Songs and Stories” is back in the shop between performances, and even though this is reassessment time for Anderson, her days are crammed and complicated enough to guarantee that the unexpected will happen often. A pop musician with a tenacious cult following, and a bona fide soldier of the SoHo avant-garde, she seems always to have four things to do at once.

She sits cross-legged on the floor, still a scrawny gamin at 52. Then she jumps up, darts across the room, clicks her mouse on a computer screen, punches numbers into a cell phone, turns off a bank of humming machines, vanishes and returns a few moments later cradling her little dog. She doesn’t so much answer questions as skate away and around them, letting her thoughts alight wherever they choose. At the moment her mind is on the string part she has promised to record that evening for her boyfriend Lou Reed’s new album. She will have to write it in the cab, she says with a grin, obviously juiced by the pressure to improvise.

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A few days later, the string part is ancient history and Anderson is sitting in a SoHo restaurant, efficiently stripping the meat off a roast chicken leg and laying it out on her plate before beginning to eat. She is a plain-spoken urban poet who always seems slightly amused. Her own celebrity, the timely absurdities of politics, the global itineraries of whales, the view from her studio window--it all gets absorbed into her terse, wry commentaries. She is a storyteller by trade, and her tone--cerebral, topical, direct and funny--could not be more distant from Melville’s lavish bluster.

“At first, doing ‘Moby-Dick’ was almost cripplingly daunting. ‘Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn,’ ” she recites. “That’s fabulous language, but how do you get that to come out of people’s mouths?”

Replete with brutish men and the gory minutiae of disemboweling whales, “Moby-Dick” has a biblical, epic tone. “It’s a guy book,” Anderson admits thinking early on. “What would I be doing in this?”

Yet Anderson has always concocted her own yarns and held the stage alone with her violin. So there she is, in her own “Moby-Dick,” an impish presence on the Pequod’s womanless voyage--rolling out Melville’s rough tales in her intimate molasses contralto, as if she were narrating the book during a late-night phone call. Four male actors join her onstage, slipping in and out of the shipboard roles.

Behind them, on a pair of adjacent screens, waves charge toward the audience, antique maps scroll by, written words cascade and disappear like raindrops, stars mill and glint. The score’s bare tunes curl over deep, lung-shaking drones and the deep-sea chatter of whale clicks. Anderson waves a “talking stick”--an aluminum tube crammed with microprocessors--and each stroke and swing produces a hyperactive clamor as if from an offstage orchestra of ghosts.

Anderson has had to jettison many of her early ideas, and the project has become less a staged version of Melville’s novel than a piece of critical theater that swims alongside.

“I’ve given up on representing a lot of the characters,” she says, wistfully. “I think of my notebooks full of songs about Queequeg,” the hulking and taciturn Polynesian harpooner who befriends the narrator of Melville’s book. “Now he’ll never be mentioned.”

Though she couldn’t fit it all in, it’s clear that Anderson adores everything about the novel: the luscious, meaty language, the characters who glimmer and vanish, the florid rantings of the possessed Captain Ahab, the hallucinatory tone, the pages of plotless weirdness broken by spasms of action. The excursions into the technology of whale hunting and coffin making appeal to the tinkerer in Anderson, a gadget builder who trolls the spare-part emporiums of Canal Street for ideas.

“I also enjoy the academic stuff,” she confesses, “the parts about some obscure character holed up in a basement somewhere trying to decide what’s a whale and what’s not.

“Melville has a wild approach to narrative,” Anderson continues. “He begins, ‘Call me Ishmael,’ then goes on to use a hundred different voices, and we don’t know who he is anymore.”

It’s a technique not unlike Anderson’s. Over the years, in her songs and shows, she has multiplied her own voices, speaking through a battery of filters. On her first album, she metamorphosed into the unflappable captain of a plane about to crash (in “From the Air”) and became a menacing, omniscient mother in her hit “O Superman.” In later shows, she donned an unpleasant, all-knowing timbre modeled on Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley: “the voice of authority.”

But while Melville’s voices give his book a panorama of passions, the amiably guarded Anderson likes ventriloquism for the distance it provides. She courts detachment in her art--which is why, she points out, she likes to temper music with slides, projections and loops of film. “There’s something about the way we absorb things visually that’s much cooler than the way we listen to music. People don’t cry in front of their favorite paintings the way they do listening to their favorite song. The eyes are wired to the brain and the ears to the heart.”

Never one to bare her emotions in public, she has generally deflected attention from herself by populating her songs and stories with an enormous cast of vivid cameos. There is, for example, the smiling intruder she describes in a song, with “big white teeth/Like luxury hotels/On the Florida coastline.” Or the man she meets who “might have been a hat-check guy at an ice rink.” With her monochrome costumes (white suit in the ‘80s, black suit in the ‘90s) and starburst of hair, she has tended to disappear into an almost blank persona. She has always kept a few feet of irony between herself and the topic of romance, and it’s amusing to her now, in middle age, to be getting involved in Reed’s rock ‘n’ roll sensibility.

“It’s a little strange to play on your boyfriend’s songs about failed love,” she comments, with the same friendly smile she uses to deflect all intrusive questions. Somehow, Reed’s foursquare, downbeat-heavy style must have found a way of melding with Anderson’s tricky syncopations and incantatory melodies in the hundreds of hours of music they have taped in private jam sessions. As to whether the world will ever hear some of those late-night collaborations, Anderson smiles again and shrugs. “We’ll see.”

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Reed and Anderson, though they did not meet until 1992, are both products of SoHo, a once-industrial neighborhood that has acquired mythic status for their generation of artists. When Anderson arrived there in the early 1970s, from a suburban Midwest childhood, college at Barnard and graduate work in sculpture at Columbia, the neighborhood was a humming incubator of the imagination. It was a place of low rents and few rules, where creators with more inventiveness than skill could try things out on willing audiences. One of Anderson’s pieces from those years was “Duets on Ice,” in which she played the violin wearing skates enclosed in blocks of ice. When the ice melted, the performance was over.

“Once I got over feeling like I was a real fool,” she later told author John Howell, “I thought, ‘It’s not that bad to be a fool.’ ”

“She almost embodies the ‘70s in New York,” says Roselee Goldberg, a New York University professor whose book about Anderson will be published by Harry Abrams next spring. “The whole scene was about artists encouraging each other to work in different disciplines. People don’t really know how to add up all the different parts of her.”

Anderson began cobbling performances together out of songs, stray anecdotes (both true and not) and sketchy drawings. For one installation, she wired a table so that someone sitting with his elbows on it would hear music conducted through his bones. She rigged up an electric talking fiddle, filled a violin with water so that it would weep when she played Tchaikovsky’s lachrymose Concerto, and fitted herself out with a neon mouthpiece so that her teeth glowed.

“For me electronics have always been connected to storytelling,” she wrote in her retrospective book “Stories From the Nerve Bible,” in 1994. “Maybe that’s because storytelling began when people used to sit around fires and because fire is magic, compelling and dangerous. We are transfixed by its light and by its destructive power. Electronics are modern fires.”

Anderson spent much of that period on the road. She traveled incessantly around America, taking odd jobs, meeting odd people and mining the country for material. Among her finds was a recipe for road-kill possum with a gravy of coffee, cornmeal and maple syrup. She toured Europe too, lugging suitcases full of microphones and cables to small German art galleries and Italian town squares.

In 1981, Anderson released “O Superman,” a hypnotic, eerie piece of minimalist songwriting in which Mom and the paternal government melded in an electronic wash. Typically for Anderson, who habitually draws on William S. Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, academic theorist Walter Benjamin and, of course, Melville, the song had fairly high-flown origins: It’s based on the prayerful aria “O Souverain,” from Massenet’s 1885 opera “Le Cid.” The single came out on a bargain-basement label, 110 Records, and peaked at No. 2 on the British charts. With some ambivalence, Anderson signed an eight-record contract with Warner Bros. Records, and suddenly she was not only a pop star, but also an avant-gardist with clout.

It was an equivocal move. Her SoHo coterie dismissed her as a sellout, and there were times she was tempted to agree. On the other hand, her hip visibility appealed enormously to Harvey Lichtenstein, the swashbuckling impresario of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Lichtenstein had raised his institution’s profile by giving artists accustomed to penury and no-frills lofts a crack at working on a large scale. Among the careers he shepherded into the mainstream were those of composer Philip Glass, director Robert Wilson and choreographer Pina Bausch.

Anderson arrived at BAM with a project that had already stirred up an anthill’s worth of journalists. “United States,” which consisted of much of her ‘70s flotsam stitched into a multi-part political commentary, had already toured the country in truncated form. When BAM presented the work in its eight-hour, two-evening version in 1983, the event made Anderson the world’s preeminent performance artist.

The period that followed is not one Anderson looks back on fondly, though many of her fans do. She worked indefatigably, producing elaborate spectacles such as “Natural History,” releasing well-received albums such as “Mister Heartbreak” and granting a stream of interviews. But all through that, Anderson later said, she felt like a “minstrel”--a grinning, desperate entertainer satisfying her audience’s craving for sumptuous showmanship. The comradely, rough-plank world of her avant-garde period seemed suddenly very distant.

In “Stories From the Nerve Bible,” she writes: “A lot of things sort of broke apart in the mid-’80s. . . . SoHo had become hot and the art market was exploding. My neighborhood had disappeared.” The low point came with the release, in 1986, of her concert movie “Home of the Brave,” an overproduced hodgepodge she wound up hating slightly more than the critics did.

What saved her was her sense of humor, which was always subversive and self-deprecating at the same time. “I also like the B-side of the national anthem, ‘Yankee Doodle,’ ” she told audiences during the “Empty Places” tour in 1989. “If you can understand the words to this song, you can understand anything that’s happening in the avant-garde today.” Offended by the glitz and excess of the 1980s, Anderson pared back her aesthetic: “Voices From the Beyond,” which she assembled in 1991, was more of a lecture-cum-slide-show than a piece of theater.

But Anderson has a sophisticated sense of the zeitgeist, and the scale of her work has followed the vicissitudes of the Dow Jones Industrial Average with uncanny precision. As the country pulled out of recession and she out of depression, her ambitions grew again. In the last few years, she has alternated stripped-down solo tours with grand expeditions whose outfitting rivals the Pequod’s.

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Her act has gotten slicker over the years and her tools more streamlined. Instead of home-cobbled instruments with the wires showing, she now uses fleets of interlocked computers. The technology has become more familiar, too. Her custom-made electronic violin is not unlike a model that any student musician can buy in order to practice with headphones so as not to disturb the neighbors.

Even so, Anderson still wants the moving parts to show, and she surrounds herself in performance with gear that could just as easily be secreted in the wings. Unused to sharing the stage with other people, she is comfortable around inanimate equipment that can act as a conduit to her magic.

“I have to bring a couple of things,” she once insisted, “because it’s so frightening otherwise.”

In an early version of “Songs and Stories,” Anderson sauntered around the stage, as she usually does, but Melville’s novel, she felt, required a more solemn, substantial presence than she could provide on her own.

“I just ordered an enormous white chair for [“Songs and Stories”],” Anderson announces happily. “Fourteen feet. I felt it needed something on that scale.” She lights a cigarette, wonders whether the device will finally pull the show together and giggles. “There’s a problem with ordering giant set-pieces to fix up a scene, though.”

She launches into a story--of the kind she tells onstage--about a massive piece of last-minute scenery she ordered in 1995 to boost the climax of the stage version of “Stories From the Nerve Bible.”

“The scene wasn’t working and I felt that what it needed was a huge meteorite,” she recounts. The piece, built in the set shop of the Metropolitan Opera, eventually caught up with her on tour in Jerusalem, and it took most of a day to get it past a battalion of suspicious Israeli customs officials. “Finally, we opened the crate, and inside was an enormous turd, slightly glittery. We couldn’t use it, so we just had to cart it everywhere we went.”

There is, one senses, something reassuring to Anderson about roaming the world hauling a lump of useless scenery. Perhaps it suggests to her that however elaborate her productions are, all that really matters is the stories she has to tell, and her own role as a conspicuous observer, staring back at the world that looks at her. A quarter-century in SoHo has taught her that if the sets repel or the machines malfunction, she can always improvise.

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“Songs and Stories From ‘Moby-Dick,’ ” Wednesday-Saturday, 8 p.m., Saturday, 2 p.m., UCLA, Royce Hall $13-$40. (310) 825-2101.