Aviva Studios, Manchester
Contemplating a world of catastrophe and collapse, the veteran artist’s new three-hour show, though much too long and diffuse, has moments of poignancy – and joy

The world premiere of Laurie Anderson’s new three-hour multimedia extravaganza begins with a sparkling globe spinning on a big screen like a Christmas tree bauble. Its surroundings are less jolly: a mushroom cloud, a raincloud soon surrounded by thunder, and a low, disturbing drone.

Weaving together music, storytelling, film, animation, a local choir and more, Ark: United States V explores, says its press bumf, “what has brought us here and how much time do we have left”. Its scheduling, just after Donald Trump’s potential election victory, one assumes, was not a coincidence.

It’s also a follow-up. United States I-IV debuted at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in February 1983, where Anderson, then 35, explored life in Ronald Reagan’s America. In two parts split over consecutive nights, it was a similar mix of forms and styles, when climate change was a new-ish kid on the block and the cold war was frosty. Things are arguably chillier now.

That production included her eerie, eight-minute-plus masterpiece O Superman – a surprise No 2 hit in the UK in late 1981 after the support of Radio 1 DJ John Peel, which led to an eight-album deal with Warner Bros. Meshing together the familiarity of a phone call from mother with the failed attempt to rescue US hostages in Tehran in early 1980, she told 60 Minutes presenter Anderson Cooper in 2022, it was a song about how “technology cannot save you”. Recently, funnily enough, it’s had a revival on TikTok.

O Superman doesn’t feature tonight, although other songs and elements of Anderson’s past do, including her arresting 1982 track Walking and Falling. She also begins the show wearing headlamp-lit glasses, just as she ended Part IV more than four decades ago.