Laurie Anderson’s ‘Happiness’ Spins Stories out of Silence

Laurie Anderson owes technology’s toys a thank you or two. Without her eccentric electronic sounds and images, she likely would not have become the first and still the only performance artist to catch the fancy of a large public (at least by art world standards). Nor, without technology’s help, might she have become quite so interesting a musician.

But technology has not, it appears, bought her happiness--at least it has not in her latest work, “Happiness,” which was given its world premiere Wednesday night in Campbell Hall at UC Santa Barbara.

The 95-minute performance, which will now begin an extensive tour (it comes to UCLA’s Royce Hall on Feb. 9), is not exactly low-tech--there are enough machines with their glowing lights attached to her electronic keyboard to make it, maybe, medium-tech. But compared with her latest multimedia opera, “Songs and Stories From ‘Moby-Dick,’” in which she often seemed overwhelmed by gigantic visuals and trapped on the rock ‘n’ roll treadmill of a blasting backbeat, the new performance piece feels almost like sitting around an electronic hearth with a masterful, appealingly obsessive storyteller.

“Happiness” is a series of glimpses from Anderson’s recent experiences and how those experiences have caused her to recall her past. Anderson has always been an eagle-eyed observer of people and places.

Attending her epic four-hour multimedia opera from the ‘80s, “United States,” could feel like one was being magically dropped here and there around the country for quick, surprising glimpses of this or that.

Before there was any chance of settling in, we were plucked up and spirited away to some other place. It was a postmodernist voyeur’s paradise, with Anderson as our offbeat, engagingly cocky guide.

In “Happiness,” a more mature and self-aware Anderson sheds a protective layer or two from her psyche as she reads short anecdotes about her life and observations from the past year.

For more than 30 years, her home has been the downtown arts scene in Manhattan. She watched and heard the World Trade towers being built from an apartment two blocks away. She now knows a changed world from a home 10 blocks from ground zero.

These are among the experiences Anderson, illuminated on a dark stage, recounts while noodling inoffensive drones on her sampler and keyboard. She occasionally plays her electronic violin, creating waves of variously ominous and comforting sounds. Once or twice, she breaks into a haunting sung refrain. And she cannot resist, at one point, putting a light bulb in her mouth--she is, after all, Laurie Anderson.

But mainly she talks, and the talk, at its most eloquent moments, approaches music.

For all her invention with imagery and love of gadgetry, Anderson is a Minimalist at heart (she is the absolutely ideal reader of Don DeLillo’s disturbingly spare prose in a recent audio book of the novella “The Body Artist”). Those gadgets, such as the Vocoder that makes her voice deep and masculine, are the tools of a trickster. But in “Happiness,” Anderson seems searching, if not for truth or answers exactly (she’s too cunning for that), at least for honesty and directness.

She realizes she is not going to learn much from machines. “Computers are stupid,” she says, because there is no such thing as digital silence. They are either off or on, whereas when humans say nothing, there is still plenty going on with them.

So part of her quest has been to come to terms with silence. She volunteers to help out on an Amish farm and watches an angry family wordlessly fume for days on end at the kitchen table. She takes a two-week canoe trip with silent Buddhists down a river in Utah, only to be confronted by environmentalist guides who never shut up, each sincere group equally inflexible in its own way.

She finds happiness in surprising places, working for a couple of weeks at McDonald’s, where she expects a kind of cynical artistic silence in mindless mechanical labor and discovers a surprisingly glimpse of happiness. For the first time in her life, she finds she can give people exactly what they want.

The events of Sept. 11 reveal to Anderson the most striking example of the power of silence. How many of us noticed that the horrifying images we all saw on television over and over again that day lacked a soundtrack?

She wonders whether the mikes weren’t on, whether the cameras were too far away, or whether the screams and the deafening explosions were simply unrecordable.

But it was the silence that made the images dreamlike, that made it possible to watch them in endless loops, that mesmerized us.

Anderson tells us more about herself in “Happiness” than in any other work. But in doing so, she also tells us important things about ourselves and what we have all experienced over the past few months. In a voice that falls somewhere between speech and song, Anderson says what needs now to be said in exactly the way it can be best heard.

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Laurie Anderson, “Happiness,” Feb. 9, 8 p.m., $25-$40, Royce Hall, UCLA (310) 825-2101.