Deep poignancy and plenty of humour with Laurie Anderson at Holland Festival

Laurie Anderson visited the Holland Festival for a third time and played to a sold-out Carré. With a five-piece Sexmob, a jazz combo from New York for the occasion, she performed well-known and lesser-known songs from her oeuvre spanning more than four decades. And every song felt like it was dear to her, with fresh, new arrangements of double bass and baritone saxophone. The entire concert featured an eight-screen projection, in which I recognised images from her film Heart of a dog, but also the Chalk Room out of her VR installation.

Her focus was on older work, with a number of songs from Big Science, the 1982 record containing her unlikely hit O Superman, which entered the top 10 in the Netherlands, and even at 2 in the UK charts. My love for this exceptional performer was born then, and the reactions to the first 3 notes showed that I am not the only one.

New York avant-garde

Anderson has a background in electronic music, avant-garde, visual art, performance and film. She embodies the rich history of the New York art scene from the 1970s and beyond, was friends with legendary performance artists like Chris Burden. Burden once had himself locked in a locker for five days as a performance, but more radically, had himself shot in the arm with a small-calibre pistol as a work of art. This performance prompted Anderson's first single It's Not the Bullet that Kills You (It's the Hole), that they played with new zest yesterday.

In her interludes, Anderson showed herself at her best: wise, warm and incredibly funny. She showed a picture used on the web to demonstrate that you are not a robot. How many pictures with a fire hydrant do you see? We have to prove our humanity with a picture and that is verified by, of course, robots. Robots teach us their language. With such casual observations and her lyrics, she always has her finger on the pulse. Her familiar intonation, with pauses and accents in unexpected places give her work something that is at once sharp and warm, ironic and wise.

The announcement of Only an expert told that people who think technology is going to solve our problems don't really understand technology. And neither do problems. And then she bursts into one of her funniest songs, about how experts do nothing except be experts. If necessary in a made-up problem.

Scream

In another introduction, she recounted that Yoko Ono, asked about her reaction to the 2016 presidential election, responded with a three-minute scream. Not a performative scream, but a roar. And Anderson asked the audience to shout too. Not for three minutes, but for 10 seconds. To genocide, the war in Ukraine, climate crisis, personal crisis, there is plenty to scream very loudly for a moment. And packed theatre screamed the lungs out for seconds.

Deep emotion was also there. With Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson's late husband, on screen and with his beautiful, sometimes powerful, sometimes almost fragile voice. With six of them on stage, Anderson and Sexmob went wild with noise and gritty feedback that was reminiscent of circles around Sonic Youth. But with lyrics that made the most intense love between Reed and Anderson palpable, nay, tangible. It was raw, intense, but so strong and loving. As Alfred Lord Tennyson poetically put it, "Tis better to have loved and lost, than to never have loved at all".

Martial arts on half a square metre

The evening ended with Tai Chi, the martial art Anderson practised with Lou Reed. She asked the room to stand up and join in, if we wanted. A little awkwardly in far too little space, we tried to follow her fluid movements. But make no mistake, she told us, the graceful movements of the arm, is the movement of a decapitation. It is not a dance for old people, it is martial art. And with that phrase, that brief introduction into something that is alien to most visitors, she demonstrated her magic: soft, warm, humorous, but ultimately razor-sharp.

In this impromptu encore, it may not have succeeded in the dao embrace, or fathom the Yang style, but we did get a little closer to Laurie Anderson.