Pioneering multimedia artist Laurie Anderson is set to deliver her first performance in Wales at this month’s Llais Festival. The New Yorker has long combined the political and personal in her art, with the Wales Millennium Centre hosting an exclusive music-meets-memoir show, Friends And Teachers. On which basis Menna Wilson spoke to Anderson.
“In these stones horizons sing.”The words of Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis, which emblazon the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff Bay, have captured the attention of Laurie Anderson, who will be performing there as part of the 2026 Llais festival programme.
“I find ‘in these stones horizons sing’ an evocative image,” she tells me over a Zoom call from Los Angeles; “one I’m searching for meaning in. Stones and singing is something to live by.” Expanding on her attraction to Lewis’ poem, she recalls taking a walk with Jonathan Meiburg, lead singer of Shearwater; it inspired a collaboration, You And Your Dog, featured on the band’s latest album.
“There was no water, low tide, like when a tsunami wave is coming. Where the water meets the sky was vague and indistinct; there was this eeriness of the situation.” She left Meiburg to his own devices, momentarily, but sensed something different – troublingly so, maybe – when he returned. “I thought a part of him was left at the horizon, and the other half has walked back. But maybe the opposite happened, and I left part of myself there. Sometimes I think there are two phantom versions of us still out there, left at the horizon, walking and talking forever.”
Friends And Teachers, a performance featuring a series of portraits from Anderson’s book-in-progress, has been crafted exclusively for Llais. Despite the title’s hints at a smaller, personal investment, Anderson’s discussion suggests the performance will continue to be concerned with the ways in which the personal sits alongside, and indeed within, much broader structures. Mentioning a talk she delivered in Vienna last year, the artist stresses her interest in such political structures, singling out Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations.
“They’re these stoic meditations on how to govern, and what love has to do with that,” she tells me, going on to link this to Cornel West’s maxim, “Justice is what love looks like in public.” To this end, Anderson’s art explores and builds upon these converging boundaries of love and governance, showing them to be much like that hazy boundary between sea and sky.
As an artist, Anderson has enjoyed consistent global renown since the 1970s, and in recent years especially, her art has reflected a deep interest in guideposts. In Republic Of Love – her other new show for 2026, which she’s in LA to perform when she speaks to Buzz – she lists the three rules she and late husband Lou Reed used to live by. Then there’s Church Of Panic, a song recorded in 2023 and released this year on a live album, Let X=X, whichfeatures a list of three rules her friend had constructed for depressed students.
“As an artist and person, I like to understand if guideposts are set, to understand behaviour,” she explains. How does she implement such guideposts in her personal life? “They’re not fixed rules, not laws, but suggestions – formulations to see the world in a certain way. One example is that it is important to make and create – but on another day, I might think that’s an idiotic rule.”
Anderson turns 80 next year, and has lost none of her ire at society’s ills: a fair portion of our interview time outlines her distaste for an octogenarian New Yorker who also happens to be her country’s President. Still, she says, trying to rationalise the vastly different ways she and the likes of Donald Trump seem to approach life: “In a world where everything changes radically, second by second, we all have our own way to make it make sense.”
Perhaps aptly, then, she has a reason for being circumspect about the content of her Friends And Teachers show: “I still don’t know what I’m going to do!” No cause for concern: Laurie Anderson’s position in the personal-political intersection allows her art and guidance to be adaptable, relevant, and sensitive to change.
Laurie Anderson, Llais @ Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff Bay, Thurs 8 Oct
Tickets: £24-£44. Info: here
words MENNA WILSON
