Arts & Lectures
2001-2002 Performing Arts Season News Release
For Immediate Release

December 21, 2001
Contact: Susan Gwynne
(805) 893-2098
e-mail: gwynne-s@sa.ucsb.edu

UCSB Arts & Lectures co-commissions and presents the world premiere of Happiness, Laurie Anderson’s new solo work, at Campbell Hall

Summary Facts:

UCSB Arts & Lectures will present acclaimed singer/songwriter/storyteller/violinist/media whiz Laurie Anderson performing the world premiere of Happiness, a new solo work, on Wednesday & Thursday, January 30 & 31 at 8 pm in UCSB Campbell Hall. Anderson is perhaps best known for her multimedia extravaganzas like United States Live I-V (1983) and Songs and Stories from Moby Dick (2000) that bring together music, deadpan wit, avant-garde theater and cutting edge technology. However, for her new piece Happiness, she has opted to take a stripped down approach. “I’ve worked with technology for so long that I just need to get away from it,” she clarified in a newspaper interview. “I’ve learned that it’s very hard to get soul into a machine. They’re so stupid and brittle. I’m just not having that love affair anymore.”

One impetus for the show developed from Anderson’s putting herself in unfamiliar experiences, such as working as counter help at McDonald’s and laboring at an Amish farm. Anderson explains, “I just wanted to put myself in different situations to get myself out of my own perspective, which is New Yorker, woman, artist.” The events of September 11 further altered the creation of the piece. In a statement Anderson explained, “But shock in the form of terrorism propelled me into a different place. I imagine it’s 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.”

Anderson grew up in Glen Ellyn, a suburb of Chicago, moving to her adopted home of New York City when she was twenty. She first gained performance art acclaim for a piece that had roots in her experience playing violin with the Chicago Youth Symphony: standing in ice skates frozen in blocks of ice, she fiddled till she melted free. Her recording career took off when “O Superman” was an unlikely chart hit in England in 1981. Since then she has recorded eight albums, most recently Life on a String, released on Nonesuch Records in the fall of 2001, which Rolling Stone called “the artist at her poignant best.” She has collaborated with a wide array of pop and avant luminaries, including Peter Gabriel, Brian Eno, Bill Laswell, Nile Rogers, Adrian Belew, Phoebe Snow and Lou Reed, who is also her long-time significant other.

Anderson has toured the world with her shows, which range from simple spoken word solo evenings to full band multi-media events. Major works have included her incisive and epic look at America United States Live I-V and the recent Songs and Stories for Moby Dick, based on and responding to Herman Melville’s classic. A DVD of that show, directed by Academy Award winner Mike Figgis, will be released this year, joining her other concert film Home of the Brave.

Beyond her recording and touring, Anderson is a Renaissance woman of the arts. She has published six books, including Extreme Exposure, which features text from her solo appearances. Her visual work has appeared in museums and galleries throughout the world. Her compositions have appeared in films by Wim Wenders and Jonathan Demme and accompanied dance pieces by Bill T. Jones and Trisha Brown. It’s little surprise that The New York Times wrote, “Ms. Anderson has by now entered the pantheon of late-20th-century American artists, joining such figures as Japser Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol. Her work captures an essential ’Americanness’ of American art.”

This new performance by Laurie Anderson is the first time in its more than forty-year history that UCSB Arts & Lectures has co-commissioned work. “We are proud to begin commissioning work as well as presenting it,” Celesta Billeci, Director of Arts & Lectures, claims. “To be able to launch such a project by nurturing an artist as talented as Laurie Anderson only adds to our excitement in presenting her. We look forward to helping other performers bring their artistic visions to fruition.” Other co-commissioners are Cal Performances, University of California, Berkeley; Hopkins Center, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; PICA (Portland Institute for Contemporary Arts) and Leslie B. Durst, Portland, OR; University of Florida Performing Arts, Gainesville, FL; University Musical Society of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI; Scottsdale Center for the Arts, Scottsdale, AZ; Society for Performing Arts, Houston, TX. After the premiere in Santa Barbara, Laurie Anderson will take the show on a 24-city tour culminating in two performances at New York’s Lincoln Center in summer 2002.

Laurie Anderson is presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures; the performance is sponsored by the Santa Barbara Independent. This residency is funded in part by the California Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment of the Arts, a federal agency.

For tickets or more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.

Editor: For photos, please call
Susan Gwynne at (805) 893-2098.

©2001 UCSB Arts & Lectures, University of California, Santa Barbara