While The Town Hall is temporarily closed, please join us as we bring to you a series of live-streamed and archived performances from the iconic stage of Town Hall. Please subscribe to our channel and turn on notifications to stay in touch with us as we are able to unearth and dust off other archived recordings.
PREMIERE: Tuesday, March 24 at 7PM: Laurie Anderson - All the Things I Lost in the Flood
Originally performed at The Town Hall on Thursday, February 15, 2018.
Read Notes from the Program
All the Things I Lost in the Flood
A reading and performance with music visuals and electronics
“The world is made of stories and as stories escalate and get shorter and shorter until they’re ten word tweets and as our sense of reality continues to shred, we see that this is not a political situation, it’s an existential one-” writes Anderson, “And we suddenly see: we’re drowning in our own stories.”
Laurie Anderson’s new book All the Things I Lost in the Flood is a series of essays about stories and language. In celebration of the publication of the book (released by Rizzoli in February ‘18) the artist will present a limited number of performances. The performance All the Things I Lost in the Flood includes visual images- many of them previously unpublished- as well as intimate performances with commentary of some of her iconic work with voice, electronics, codes, narrative styles and digital language. The evening also includes accounts of many of the artist’s projects, operas, installations and inventions as well as an inside look at the artist’s methods, strategies, failures and Plan B’s. A book about performance comes to life again as a performance.
“This book is about language in live performances, the difference between spoken and written words; the influence of the audience; the use of first-, second-, and third person voices; metaphor; politics-as-stories; codes; the difference between language in stories, dreams and songs; misunderstandings and new meanings ….”
“This book is also about books. In many of my films, stories and songs, there is a book in the middle. Sometimes it’s right there in the title like Songs and Stories for Moby Dick and sometimes it hides in the center or shapes the overall style or structure. Crime and Punishment, Moby Dick, The Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Bible are among the books that show up in my work.”