Laurie Anderson announces dark comedy live stage show about the end of the world

10 July 2024, 11:31 | Written by Tyler Damara Kelly

(News)

(Laurie Anderson)

Factory International have announced the world premiere of a new live stage work from artist Laurie Anderson at Manchester’s landmark cultural venue, Aviva Studios.

Fuelled by Anderson’s fascination with humanity’s current reality, ARK: United States Part V (14-24 November 2024) brings together new music, cinematic imagery, stories and songs at her largest scale yet. ARK is an imaginative and personal interrogation of where we are now, asking: what has brought us here and how much time do we have left?

ARK fuses these themes in an ambitious new stage show about fear, disaster, preservation, invention, love and escape - from the Biblical Flood to current natural disasters and beyond. Set at a dream-like moment where the data cloud breaks, ARK offers a pause where digital representation and reality are separated, within this brief window, Anderson asks: are we running out of time? Is it too late?

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Laurie Anderson says: “For a long time I’ve wanted to make a new large-scale work about the United States - a collection of songs and stories about what has shaped this country in the 21st century. I plan to tell these stories moving through myth, journalism, fable, and Tik Tok, conjuring alternate realities and stories from my own life. Part ruminations, part long-form poems, ARK will also be a kind of 3D movie."

Tickets go on sale from Friday 12 July at 10am via factoryinternational.org.