Laurie delivers monologues with sugar and high-flown portentousness

ELECTRONIC LAURIE ANDERSON NATIONAL CONCERT HALL, DUBLIN Laurie Anderson’s threenight residency at the NCH begins with a performance of ‘Language of the Future’ — a meditation on place and memory and how they intersect with politics in the Age of Trump.

That sounds like a lot to chew on and artschool pretensions are never far away. Anderson delivers dreamy soliloquies that drift between conversational and deeply affected. Over her shoulder, a video screen projects images that often chime thematically but sometimes seem perplexing just for the sake of it. A picture of Henry David Thoreau’s 19th century writing shack speaks to our yearning for belonging, but a map of Manhattan — under which giant disembodied letters drift — feels merely surreal.

Anderson was famously the life partner of the late Lou Reed. Yet, where his default setting was brooding inscrutability, she presents an open-hearted face. Amid monologues, Anderson plays bursts of violin, the minimalism offset by the sweetness with which the pieces are rendered. There is humour too: at one point she puts a sort of transmitter in her mouth and hums maniacally, like a Dalek.

She is never less than amiable and it helps that she has an unthreatening voice, so that even her loftiest incantations are conveyed in a folksy lilt. Before us stands one of the great multimedia strategists of the past 30 years. Her greatest gift may be for feeding her audience high-flown portentousness while convincing them she is merely furnishing spoonfuls of sugar.