New York, July 22, 2008 - A year ago Laurie Anderson played the Highline Ballroom as a part of the High Line Festival curated by David Bowie. That intimate venue and the dozens that followed throughout North and South America and Europe in many ways have served as Anderson's laboratory for the project she calls Homeland.  "Homeland is about love and war -- two things that have been on my mind recently," said Anderson in an interview with Lincoln Center Festival's Charles Sheek.  "So more or less I collect ideas in notebooks and put them in stories and songs.  It's great to edit them with a live audience so touring has been essential to the creation of the piece."  As a light-show performance, Homeland has evolved in the last year from the hyper-frenetic digital projections of Mark Coniglio as staged at the High Line Festival to the more languid lighting of the current production.  This latest installment of Homeland, however, continues to employ those naked incandescent light bulbs at the ends of long electrical cords.

Tuesday afternoon's dress rehearsal doubled as the press photo-call and hinted at the refinement coupled with force that is Laurie Anderson's program.  Both the musicians and the stage lighting were put through the paces one last time before the opening notes were to be played Tuesday evening.  At one point during the rehearsal, Anderson and her sound man Charlie Campbell spent a solid five minutes attempting to isolate a low-level, nearly inaudible whirring noise coming from her side of the stage.  Meticulous timing was the goal as they planned the exact time Campbell should mute the sound of Greg Cohen's electric bass just as he was to set it down in exchange for his upright, in order to reduce as much ambient sound as possible lest it clang into, say, the bird sounds delicately being made on the viola by Eyvind Kang.  The attention to detail is surely nothing new to Anderson, but all the same no less important for this homecoming of Homeland to Lincoln Center's Rose Theater, which runs for five nights through Saturday, July 26th.

Text and photographs by Damien Neva