Laurie Anderson Turns Central Park Into a Chorus of American Ghosts
Laurie Anderson will bring “ublicublic of Love” to Central Park SummerStage on June 26, joining the City Parks Foundation’s 40th-anniversary season with a performance that folds politics, memory, and song into a single 90-minute set. Backed by Sexmob, the downtown jazz band that emerged from the Knitting Factory’s free-improv scene in the 1990s, Anderson will weave her own music together with voices and ideas from Cornel West, Bob Dylan, Gertrude Stein, William S. Burroughs, Arthur Russell, Pema Chödrön, and Allen Ginsberg.
The project began, Anderson said, with an invitation from Milo Rau to speak in Vienna about the rise of fascism. That talk took place at ORF, the radio station where Hitler announced the annexation of Austria, in a setting Anderson described as bunker-like and unsettling. From there, the work expanded beyond lecture into performance, with Anderson treating the piece as a kind of gathering of “guest ghosts” — figures whose writing and speech help frame questions of freedom, language, and public life.
She said the show includes songs such as “Big Science,” “Language Is a Virus,” and “Junior Dad,” the Lou Reed song she has called one of her favorites about fatherhood. Anderson also noted that “Big Science” feels newly resonant now, especially in its line about “every man for himself,” while “Language Is a Virus” speaks to a culture in which words can spin out of control.
The performance also carries a distinctly American thread. Anderson pointed to Cornel West’s line, “Justice is what love looks like in public,” as a guiding idea, and to Allen Ginsberg’s question, “America why are your libraries full of tears?” as part of the show’s emotional register. She described the work as a celebration of freedom rather than a simple political lament.
Anderson is already looking ahead to another piece for August, this one with string players and tied to the United States’ 250th anniversary. She said she wants that work to respond to difficult political conditions without becoming a dirge. In Anderson’s hands, the anniversary year is less a commemorative milestone than an open question about what American culture still has the language to hold.
