Laurie Anderson casts a spell (and a bit of tai chi) at L'Auditori

BarcelonaSome gestures are worth an entire concert. Laurie Anderson has the audience at L'Auditori under a spell when she starts playing. Junior dadThe song by Lou Reed and Metallica. Suddenly, the voice of Reed, Anderson's late partner, is heard. The screen in the background shows an image of him, not very clear but unmistakable. She picks up her violin and walks toward the screen, as if she wants to merge with the memory. You'd have to be a bad soul not to be moved. It's just one of the many memorable moments of the concert Laurie Anderson gave last Monday in Barcelona as part of the Jazz Festival program. A deconstructionist by nature, the 78-year-old American artist is currently on tour with Sexmob, the group of Steven Bernstein, a musician steeped in the New York jazz avant-garde associated with the Knitting Factory. All of this translates into eight musicians on stage, with a vast array of timbres and, above all, the ability to present different interpretations of Anderson's songs and covers, such as their performance ofIn hard rain's a-gonna fall, by Bob Dylan, based on the arrangement by the Kronos Quartet, and the wonderful It is a lovely day by Arthur Russell

The performance, therefore, had a more musical character than spoken wordIn any case, there was no shortage of poetic inspiration or political commentary. For example, he celebrated Zohran Mamdani's victory in the New York mayoral election (and the audience responded with a standing ovation.) She also contrasted the uncompassionate Christianity of US Vice President JD Vance with the humanist Catholicism of Pope Leo XIV, who, like Anderson, was born in Illinois. Long devoted to Buddhist serenity, she admitted she had even considered converting to Catholicism. She debunked what Donald Trump provokes... More broadly, she proselytized cities as bastions of progressivism in a speech that is sure to comfort the enlightened left in Manhattan but may be met with suspicion in other contexts.

The magnificent concert was constructed like a spell with avant-garde elements from the past and elegant, rather than jarring, deconstructions of pieces like Big scienceHe captivated with the rhythmic mantra of Language is a virus and injected Jamaican perfume into It's not the bullet that kills you, it's the holeAll of this was presented in an elegiac tone, as if Anderson had conceived the tour as an exercise in artistic and poetic memory. On the same screen where Lou Reed appeared, there were also William S. Burroughs, Cornel West, John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, Jorge Luis Borges, Gertrude Stein, George W.S. Trow, Bob Dylan, and Pema Chödrön—musical, literary, political, and spiritual touchstones, most of them deceased. He also incorporated humor, as when he recounted the story of his Swedish grandfather, Axel Anderson, who emigrated to the United States, or when, at the end of the concert, he explained that Lou Reed was a master of tai chi but clumsy with the Chinese names of the postures, which he renamed, in English, "the pike, the ... The audience, captivated by the spell, participated.

[This chronicle does not include any photographs of the concert because the artist demanded to review the photographs before authorizing their publication. ARA did not accept these conditions]