Factory International, Manchester
A mix of beat poetry, opera, communal screaming, TikTok and tai chi, Anderson’s state-of-the-nation work is occasionally poignant but mostly baffling

Ai Weiwei is God, Elon Musk is the devil, the Doomsday Clock is ticking, atomic bombs are exploding and the audience are screaming their lungs out. And that is just a fraction of Laurie Anderson’s sprawling and discombobulating Ark: United States V. It is a mix of music, cinema, opera and performance that, according to Anderson, tells “stories moving through myth, journalism, fable and TikTok, conjuring alternate realities and stories from my own life. Part ruminations, part long-form poems.” It’s “a large-scale portrait of a country … asking questions about democracy, war and freedom”.

If that sounds muddy on paper then it doesn’t get any clearer on stage. This three-hour multimedia performance is part beat poetry biography backed by an instrumental avant-jazz duo, part AI-generated film, part Ted Talk, part biblical allegory, part who knows what. At one point Anderson instructs the audience to scream for 10 seconds (quite fun), based on Yoko Ono’s response to the election. Then the Velvet Underground song Ocean is spun into a bit on rising sea levels, though it fails to harness the crashing, cascading power of the original.