Tag Archives: Laurie Anderson

Adam Page’s influence on my musical creation

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When it came to creating this looped song, I thought it would have been much simpler than it actually turned out to be. When faced with learning how to use this loop pedal (something I’ve never used before), it was a daunting task, made even more daunting with the knowledge of a live audience. But over the last couple of days I’ve turned to my most influential solo performer for some guidance, Adam Page. During the beginning of this process a lot of my work was influenced by Laurie Anderson, which subsequently allowed me to form the basis of my show. However, as my ideas and concepts have developed, I have found my work steering away from the constant avant-garde musical underscoring of Laurie Anderson and more onto narrative and musical storytelling artists such as Adam Page.

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I watched numerous of his performances, and gathered performance acting techniques, as well as musical techniques.

What I’ve learn from Adam

He is a great storyteller. He structures many of his shows around a single event or story, tells that story, then improvises a song about it. I would like to use this structure within my performance. To use the song as a commentary on my situation and story, rather than the song as the main focus like in much of Laurie Anderson’s work.

All of his musical work is completely improvised. This therefore makes the performance seem raw and slightly rugged. I really like this and think this honesty could be quite endearing in my performance. As the performances are all improvised, the objects he chooses to make music from are randomly picked from the objects around him. I like this a lot, and although my objects will be pre-chosen, I will perform it as though they are spontaneous decisions. I think doing this will be more in keeping with the relaxed, chilled out atmosphere, rather than being structured and pre-planned (which is completely contrasting to my cocoon).

My attempt at looping 

Below is an example of one of many first attempts at looping. It was not as complex as I wanted the final song to be, but it was one of many stepping-stones towards the final piece.

After many days of experimenting with sounds and rhythms, below is a recording of the final song. Also, if the worst happens and it all goes wrong in the performance (as is often with live music), this is proof of what it should have sounded like!

With a little bit of luck

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On Thursday 21st April I watched With a little bit of luck (2016), a Paines Plough production, written by Sabrina Mahfouz. Not only was the show a treat to watch, but it was also extremely influential for my own solo performance. Through spoken word, song, and poetry, it told the story of a 19 year girl, Nadia, who’s passion for UK garage music takes her into a spiral of bad decisions.

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Immersive theatre

The ‘fist-pumping euphoria […] [and] diamond-clear language’ (Pringle, 2015) transported us, the audience, into a hypnotic trance-like place, where music and energy surged through your body, leaving it virtually impossible to not dance along. It was set in the Platform, with alcoholic drinks served from the bar, and dance music playing as soon as you stepped foot through the door. It felt more like a festival gig rather than a theatrical performance. One review commented that it offered ‘an ambient trip to the recent past […]. The mingling of live music, retro call backs and creative scripting are a fun, immersive combination’ (Fountain, 2016). I really liked how it immersed the audience into the themes of the performance from the outset, even from before the performance had started.

George Home-Cook stated that immersive theatre ‘claims to break down […] the audience/stage divide, and to invite the audience to actively participate in the theatrical event. Immersive theatre thus not only promises, but trades on it’s ability to provide a particular […] all-encompassing, multi-sensory, participatory experience’ (Home-Cook, 2015, 132). This made me think about my own performance and how I could create this intimacy and immediacy into my work. Was there any way of starting the performance (via the atmosphere) before I spoke a word? I thought back to my emphasis on my cocoons and their slow paced, homely feel.

Influenced by the works of Sabrina Mahfouz, I have decided to transform the far half of studio two into one giant stylised cocoon. The audience will walk through the door to be greeted by a dimly lit studio two. The far section will be curtained off and the audience will enter this section through a small parting in the curtains. This is my cocoon. Within this section the staging will be just as before, with the projector, music equipment and family memorabilia. I wish to create more of a relaxing atmosphere when the audience arrives to represent the comfort and relaxed way of life of my cocoons. The audience will be sat on beanbags, there will be smooth jazz playing in the background and incense sticks burning. I will be sat on stage in my pjs, having a cup of tea and reading a copy of The Stage Magazine. There is not one morning in my house that my mum and dad won’t have incense burning and jazz playing in the background; therefore I wanted to recreate this for the audience. Continuing on this idea of comfort, I will perform my entire performance in my pjs. The pjs show how I haven’t got dressed and ready to face the day, and how I’m still in my comfort zone. This draws parallels with my current situation, as I feel I have yet to get ready and face the real world, and how I’m still attached to my home relationships. When the performance is coming to an end, and I am creating music, the lights will gain brightness and by the end of the performance the audience will exit the cocoon to a brightly lit studio to, symbolising the brightly lit future now they have exited the comforting cocoons.

Speech underscored by music

What I also took from this performance was the use of music throughout the entire show. There was not one moment that was not accompanied by live musical underscoring. This stood out for me as I wanted to also underscore the last section of dialogue with the music I had made. This also reminded me of my earlier research on Laurie Anderson. Much of her work consists of spoken words underscored constantly by electronic music. For example, her most famous track Oh Superman! (1982). This unusual track seemed to hit a chord with the public at the time and rocketed to number one. The success of Laurie Anderson and With a little bit of luck, therefore, suggests that underscoring can be an effective theatrical tool. Both performances show me ways of playing with the volume and timing of the underscoring track in order to effectively interweave it into the pace of the dialogue. This is something I will be playing around with more over the next week.

Work Cited 

Fountain, T. (2016) With a little bit of luck. [online] TV Bomb. Available from http://www.tvbomb.co.uk/2016/04/with-a-little-bit-of-luck/ [Accessed 26 April 2016].

Home-Cook, G. (2015) Theatre and Aural Attention: Stretching Ourselves. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Mahfouz, S. (2016) With a little bit of luck. [performance] Stef O’Driscoll (dir.) Lincoln: Lincoln Performing Arts Centre, 21 April.

Pringle, S. (2015) Latitude 2015. [online] London: The Stage. Available from https://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/2015/latitude-2015/ [Accessed 26 April 2016].

Laurie Anderson

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Laurie Anderson is proving to be a very influential practitioner. Her use of short stories, music and technology has landed her right in the center of my research. After changing my mind numerous times, I have decided to perform an autobiographical piece based on the impact my family and relationship have on my career aspirations. Whilst researching her performance techniques I stumbled across an interview where Laurie herself summed up my performance in one simply sentence:

When asked, what does love feel like? Laurie replied ‘freedom and stillness. Lack of striving. Contentment’ (Greenstreet, 2015)

This phrase captures exactly the struggle that I want to portray. How the things you love most can sometimes be the things that can, physically and mentally, hold you back.

Anderson’s performances are often packed full of out of this world technological spectacles, dancers in eye-catching costumes and striking sets. Although I can appreciate how successful this theatrical construction was, I feel that it could sometimes overpower her social commentary and underlying stories. John O’Mahony commented that in more recent productions, Anderson’s work has become more reserved and focuses on the social commentaries and the music itself as opposed to the spectacle. Dirtday! (2012) ‘has little of her trademark back-projected hi-tec wizardry. [Suggesting that] those things get in the way of the music’ (O’Mahony, 2009). Although I shall take influence from Anderson’s earlier musical performances, I wish to stage my performance more simply like her later work so there are little distractions to the story.

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^ Original eccentric staging                                ^ More recent relaxed staging.

It is easy to get swept up in the musical spectacle, and overlook her extraordinary storytelling ability. ‘What people really love about Laurie Anderson are the stories she tells, and the way she tells them’ (McDaid, 2008). Many of her performances are social commentaries on current social situations, however the way she tells them, with her soft lullaby-like vocals, captures the audience and draws them into the story more. The way she speaks is beautifully poetic. The language she uses paints a picture that captures the audience through its abstract metaphors, using ironicaly beautiful words to describe a not-so-beautiful topic. This is something that I want to incorporate into the spoken part of my piece. Providing the audience with not only a physical picture of my situation, but a chance to create their own picture in their imaginations through the use of language.

Storytelling ability aside, it is undeniable that Laurie Anderson is most famous for her music. What makes her work stand out from other musical performance art is her avant-garde approach to music and sound. For example, The Afternoon of Automotive Transmission (1972), which was a symphony of car horns held in a park. The making of music from everyday objects is something I really like of Anderson’s work. In my performance I want to be tied down by three materials (chains, rope, wire, etc.) from which I will create sounds. These sounds will then be layered on top of one another to create a musical track. One idea is to be restrained by wire, which I would then play with a violin bow.

Like Anderson, I really enjoy minimalism in terms of music and I want to focus on avant-garde music as opposed to the standard structured song. Walt Whitman once rightly stated that ‘simplicity is the glory of expression’ (Whitman and Reynolds, 2005, 12). I want to use the loop system to create minimalistic sounds that then can be placed onto of one another to create a complex score of metaphorical music.

Work cited 

Greenstreet, R. (2015) Q&A: Laurie Anderson. [online] London: The Guardian. Available from http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/may/16/laurie-anderson-interview [Accessed 20 February 2016].

McDaid, C. (2008) Storytime with knobs on. [online] London: The Guardian. Available from http://www.theguardian.com/music/2008/may/04/popandrock3 [Accessed 19 February 2016].

O’Mahony, J. (2008) Adults are idiots. [online] London: The Guardian. Available from http://www.theguardian.com/music/2008/apr/07/electronicmusic.art [Accessed 20 February 2016].

Whitman, W., Reynolds, D, S. (2005) Leaves of Grass. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Music and storytelling

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Music has been an aspect that has cropped up many times within my research. I like the idea of multimedia and music technology along with storytelling. So the practitioner that automatically arose for me was Laurie Anderson.  She is an American experimental performance artist and musician born in 1947 in Illinois. She originally trained as a sculpture but then expanded into music, art, theatre and film. Her work has been described as avant-garde and has proved to be very popular, as her most famous song O Superman (1981) made it to number 2 in the UK music charts.

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Anderson’s blend of music, art, technology and theatre is something that I really admire. Performances such as Duets on ice (1974) saw this artistic combination come to light. She would stand on two blocks of ice on ice-skates playing a violin. She wouldn’t stop playing until the ice had melted naturally. I don’t wish to necessarily do anything quite this avant-garde, however it did make me consider the effects that music and theatre can have when combined.

This then led my research to performance artists whose genres overlaps between musician and actor, and whose work is less avant-garde. Two people that struck my attention are Tim Minchin and Flight of the Conchords. Both of these artists use song to enhance the storytelling of the performance with a lighthearted comedic edge. I don’t want to go down the route of standup by any means, but these artists have given me understanding of how to combine humour, song and theatre into one performance.

What I found also interesting is that, although extremely different, both Flight of the Conchords and Laurie Anderson commonly speak-sing they work, or move from song to spoken work effortlessly. I think this adds fluidity to the piece, eradicating the divide between song and speech. This could be something I explore in a later date.

Below are videos of all three performance artists.

(Andreas Valentin, 2011)

(Best of Tim Minchin, 2011)

(Ella Elise, 2006)

Work Cited

Andreas Valentin (2011) Laurie Anderson Duet on Ice. [online video] Available from http://youtu.be/2SGRvhseH6I [Accessed 17 February 2016].

Best of Tim Minchin (2011) Tim Minchin – If I Didn’t Have You – Full uncut version. [online video] Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zn6gV2sdl38 [Accessed 17 February 2016].

Ella Elise (2006) Flight of the Chonchords – Albi (racist dragon). [online video] Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-jVAHAuiS4 [Accessed 17 March 2016].

Loop Station

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As of yet, I’m not sure what I want to base my piece on or what themes I want to explore. However there are a few performance concepts that interest me and that I would like to explore further.

As mentioned in previous blog posts, the notion of reenacting and imitation is something that I find fascinating, such as work from Anna Deavere Smith and Eric Bogosian. I also have a love for music and find the works of Laurie Anderson very interesting. I really enjoy the way she incorporates music into theatre, and this is something that I would very much like to incorporate into my final piece somehow.

Over the last week I have wracked my brain and watched performance after performance in the hope that some Laurie Anderson styled inspiration will appear. However to no avail. I realised I was trying to hard, so I decided to simply put my iPod on shuffle and wait. Inspiration came in the surprising form of Ed Sheeran. I was listening to one of his live performances and realised that he was using a loop station to create the depth and layering of music.

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Loop stations can record numerous sounds and layer them on top of one another. Typically it’s used for music (instruments) however, could I use this in a different way? Could I use this as a system to build layers of character’s speech? Could I incorporate rhythm and present a rhythmic performance of imitated testimonies? Could I combine my love for music and singing with character acting?

Below is a video example of how a loop box works.

(Lucie Feenstra, 2013)

I don’t want to run away with this idea this early on in the process, however this is something that I would really like to explore further.

Work Cited

Lucie Feenstra (2013) Live Loop Pedal Performance – Rhythm Interactive. [online video] Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvs2zupOA-I [Accessed 11 February 2016].