[ WEEKEND ]

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LAURIE ANDERSON Laurie Anderson has been called a "minimilist painter of melancholy moods" and tried everything from dog acrobatics to backing her performances with video. She performs tomorrow at the Leeward Community College Theatre.

A Renaissance woman
weaves an aural tapestry

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By Burl Burlingame
bburlingame@starbulletin.com

Laurie Anderson's work is known for its wit, intelligence and spare, evocative use of the language. No wonder, then, on one of the many online Web sites devoted to her, someone asked the question, "What are the words to her song 'Radar?'"

And "Seth from CalTech" responded:

"Hey! Aaaaaaaauuuuuh.

Eeeeehhhhhehhhh.

Wwooonnnnn.

Eeeehhehh. Wwonnn.

Eeeehhehhooooo. Wwooonnn.

wwooon. (very quiet)

wwooon. (very quiet)"

Anderson is a "performance artist," which means it's hard to pin her down, as if she were a beetle in an entomology collection. Let's see -- she creates aural landscapes, scores and creates films and videos, plays the violin, has graphic pieces hanging in fine-art galleries, invents musical instruments, is a creative advisor to software companies, designs costumes and trains her terrier to do acrobatics. Recently, she's even begun to sing.

Laurie Anderson Where: Leeward Community College Theatre, 96-045 Ala Ike St. When: 8 p.m. tomorrow Tickets: $35 general; $25 for students, seniors and active military Call: 455-0385

And Anderson is performing this weekend at Leeward Community College.

"Happiness," her new solo work, features stories and simple acoustic instruments. As usual, it is a meditation on contemporary culture, filtered through synthetic language, love songs, interspecies communication and technology going down in flames.

Recent interviews indicate Anderson was profoundly affected by the Sept. 11 attack. "For the past year, I have been looking for ways to escape my own perspective by putting myself in weird situations. But shock in the form of terrorism propelled me into a different place," she muses on her Web site.

"I imagine it is like this for a lot of people now, in uncertain times we find ourselves living more intensely in the present and asking the questions that have been lurking uncomfortably in the background, like what do we really believe in after all?

"'Happiness' is my way of looking at some of the things that both interest and trouble me: the evolution of behavior, how we learn and what we remember, expectations, the meaning of justice and the effects of increasing speed; colored by the darker elements of doubt and fear.

"This is the first time I have used so many experiences from my own life, which in this case has become a kind of touchstone for thinking about deception and fiction, the stories we tell ourselves so that we can go on."

Born in 1947 in Chicago, the second oldest in a family of eight, Anderson graduated from Barnard, magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, in art history and taught the subject for several years in New York colleges. She began dabbling in music, and her song "O Superman" rose to second place on the British pop charts. Her album "Big Science" was the first of seven for Warner Bros. She currently records for Nonesuch Records.

Anderson appeared last night at the Maui Arts & Cultural Center, and appears tonight at the Kahilu Theatre in Waimea.

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