Performance artist Laurie Anderson, the doyenne of New York's downtown scene, opened this year's Next Wave Festival, a month-long exploration of new artistic works, with a meditation on life. The multimedia presentation, Songs and Stories From Moby Dick, delves into the issues Herman Melville explored in his novel -- specifically, religion, natural selection and domination, obsession, humanity and mortality.

Rather than deconstruct Melville's masterwork, Anderson ponders the issues she has long held dear, many of which, coincidentally, parallel Melville's concerns. Anderson uses the novel as a springboard to question values -- sometimes obliquely and sometimes head-on -- that drive late twentieth-century Western culture. A stage-length screen fronted by a platform occupies upstage, leaving the foreground bare for the stylized but simple choreography and Anderson's walking musings. At the opening of the piece (which runs about ninety minutes with no intermission), Anderson stands alone downstage, while Tom Nelis (as Ahab) stands, erect and immobile, seemingly impervious to the sea raging behind him on-screen. Melville's words flash on the screen, and Anderson weaves Melville's original text into her introduction.

Then the performance really takes off. Anderson as the Reader (she also takes up the role of Pip, and the Whale) tells us -- while sitting in an oversize Lily Tomlin-like chair -- of Melville's friend Nathaniel Hawthorne's lukewarm reaction to Moby Dick and Melville's bitter disappointment. Ahab roars his intentions to find and kill the great whale while worldbeat rhythms and a thumping backbeat signal both the human spirit and the folly of obsession. Alternately, the Cook, Second Mate and Running Man (Price Waldman) and Anthony Turner and Miles Green (Standing Man and Falling Man, respectively) comment on the novel and today's society through simply choreographed moves, solos (Waldman's winning solo as the knowing Cook) and harmonizing trios. Throughout, bassist Sk·li Sverrison, onstage for virtually the entire show, provides the steady accompaniment. Anderson also provides instrumental coloring, playing electric violin, keyboards, guitar and talking stick, a wireless electronic instrument that can record and duplicate any sound.

Songs and Stories From Moby Dick moves from novel to the mundanity of today with no regard for linear development; plot is forsaken for the fluidity of sound. Like the novel she chose as inspiration, Anderson moves from narration to storytelling, telling us, for instance, of a meeting with a worm specialist who heads an oceanic department at an English university, then moving without interruption into relating the life of the Whale and Melville's relationship with his characters. Her music echoes the novel's schizophrenic jumps from theme to theme; the sounds are sometimes lyrical, sometimes as violent and choppy as the seas the dominate Melville's story, sometimes danceable, sometimes dark and brooding and malevolent.

Anderson indulges her musings cleverly, using movement and symbolism to propel the ninety-minute piece, never belaboring any one point or overdoing visual tricks. The Spartan stage comes alive when she and Sverrison duet over prerecorded sounds and blips and arrangements. The cast understands Anderson's motives and shares her love of economy of movement and voice, inhabiting their black clothing like ghosts. Nelis's Ahab and Explorer (who has two wonderfully staged solos involving a moon and fish lens, respectively) are strident and sometimes overbearing, as were Melville's characters; Waldman ably moves the Cook from buffoon to wise man. Anderson's music is engaging and layered, melding different rhythmic cultures (African, club-worthy beats, Western pop, Asian musical scales) seamlessly.

But no questions are answered. Has man outgrown the usefulness of a God? Will man's quest to control the chaos of nature ever end? Does love conquer anything? These themes are explored again and again in literature and music, and Anderson doesn't shy away from these heavy subjects. But Songs and Stories From Moby Dick delivers no panacea. Melville's crew dies without knowing the true motives behind Ahab's tragic quest. One hundred and fifty years later, the world is as chaotic and unexplainable. Anderson flirts and taunts, promising nothing while again raising these questions, leaving us to weigh the consequences of our choices as a society. Only our consciences can lead us, Anderson seems to be saying. Maybe there are no answers. And that, as Melville also must have well known, isn't what we want to hear.

MARIE ELSIE ST. L+GER
(October 18, 1999)