Laurie Anderson is an awarded director, author, artist and musician living in New York. Since the 1970’s she has created works spanning every art form. Her live shows contain everything from stripped down spoken word to highly detailed and advanced multi-media performances. Anderson is also a pioneer in electronic music and she has invented several musical instruments that she utilises in her music and for her performances. She has published seven books and her art has been on display at prestigious museums all over the world.

In the performance series Language of the Future, Anderson tells personal stories about love and power. The last chapter in the suite – Dear Jack – originates from the young Laurie Anderson’s correspondence with John “Jack” F. Kennedy.

In 1960, Anderson attended high school and was eager to be elected student representative. She wrote a letter to Kennedy, asking him for political advice – at this point Kennedy was in the midst of an election campaign against Richard Nixon. Surprisingly enough, the president to be answered her letter, giving her the advice: get to know your community, find out what they want, and then promise you’ll get it for them. Both Kennedy and Anderson later won their respective elections.

In Language of the Future (Dear Jack), Anderson continues her exploration of the contemporary American narrative and how it’ s being formulated. The piece is a collection of songs and stories about our current culture, and moves between dreams, reality, the information society and politics, then and now.
The piece contains Anderson’s significant violin, a voice modulation machine and other electronic instruments. ”There is a series of sounds and filters for violin, keyboard and voice, and they basically are responding to what you’re playing and saying. So it’s a very intuitive and analog-based system. It’s not button-pushing”, Anderson says about the technology behind the machine. The piece also contains visual projections and excerpts from Anderson’s latest critically acclaimed film Heart of a Dog (2015). The film is also shown in its entirety at Bio Roy on August 23 at 15:30.

Guest performer is composer/cellist Rubin Kodheli (ko-thé-lee). He is a celebrated, versatile, genre-transcending creative rebel. The inspirational tapestry of his work is intentionally woven from blended threads of rock, jazz and classical influences, a stylistic trademark that has afforded Kodheli a career rich in its diversity of output. From his compositions appearing in feature films such as Precious (2009), to his original symphonic rock compositions, to his collaborations as a performer with premier improviser composers of our time– including Dave Douglas, Henry Threadgill, Meredith Monk, and Tom Harrell– Kodheli’s eclectic work amounts to an intriguing sonic collage able to enrapture and captivate audiences. Kodheli began his musical journey as a cellist in Albania, where, as a child, he would stay up into the night absorbing celebratory performances of traditional Albanian folk music or spend days attending numerous rehearsals with his mother, singer and actress Justina Aliaj (a-lee-i). By age fifteen, he moved to Belgium to pursue formal studies at l’Académie d’Uccle and later to Germany to attend the Richard Strauss Konservatorium. In the 1990s Kodheli received a scholarship to The Juilliard School, where he studied as a pupil of cello visionary Fred Sherry.