Costantino Maeder

Laurie Anderson's Versions of Massenet / Corneille,Melville's Moby Dick and Döblin / Fassbinder

Laurie Andersons versions of Massenet / Corneille, Melvilles Moby Dick, and Doblin / Fassbinder Laurie Anderson’s performances sample elements from various components of cultural performance such as theater, ritual, dance, music, popular entertainment and sport (!), which she meshes with autobiographical references, everyday life events and media culture. This also includes the ancient art of story telling and works of literature, which she brilliantly adapts, transforms and reconfigures in order to build into her intelligent and idiosyncratic performance art. How can we account for these pre-texts and how important are they for an understanding of Anderson’s multimedia performances which thus concern adapting a highly complex intersection of narrative, visual, musical and gestural ‘pre-texts’ mediated by new technologies and the performing arts? Such an undertaking would seem to call for a theorizing the performative effect of the intermedial processes involved in adaptation. What needs to be explored is, I suggest, is • What do issues of intertextuality mean to performance and visuality studies? How does the sense of openness and of unraveling the pre-ext translate into the adaptation that a performance involves? • What is at stake when this performance not only clearly alludes to other performances but also intermedially to other media and intertextually to other texts? • What is the relationship between performance and performativity in multimedia art forms? What new spaces are created? These issues are explored in Laurie Anderson’s multilayered multimedia performances O Superman (Corneille /Massenet), Songs and Stories from Moby Dick (Melville/the Bible/Shakespeare), and White Lily (Doblin/Fassbinder).