ARK: United States V by Laurie Anderson, Aviva Studios, Manchester review - a vessel for the thoughts and imaginings of a lifetime

Picture this: framing the stage are two pearlescent clouds which, throughout the performance, gently pulsate with flickering light. Behind them on a giant screen is a spinning globe, its seas twinkling like a million stars.

Suddenly, this magical image is rent asunder. Thunder and lightning shake the heavens and torrential rain cascades down in stair rods. Spotlights flash and dance through billowing smoke while Laurie Anderson serenades the tempest on her violin and Kenny Wollesen lashes symbols and drums into a clamorous frenzy. The Apocalypse!

DEATHLY HUSH.

Anderson breaks the silence. “Hi, it’s really nice to be here,” she says as if she really means “that’s the future; this is now. And I’m really glad to be alive – still.” A brief synopsis of ARK follows. She envisaged the piece as an opera, she says, featuring Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei as Yaweh (God), Elon Musk as the Devil and the inventor of TED talks, Richard Saul Wurman as Noah. “I’m making a ship,” she tells Ai Wei Wei. “Conditions on earth make it impossible to stay, so everyone is trying to figure out where to go… Everyone wants to be a sailor.”

And so saying, the ship that Laurie built is launched on its maiden voyage at Aviva Studios, Manchester. The journey lasts three hours and consists of 50 or so stories linked by tenuous threads that weave in and out like a flow of consciousness emanating from her mind. Despite anticipating disaster, this mesmerising voyage is full of hope. Countering horror with humour, Anderson lightens the burden of anxiety. Passing on the advice of her Buddhist teacher, for instance, she says “Try to practice being sad (about the state of the world) without actually feeling sad.”ARK is in a similar format to United States Parts 1-4. Anderson moves around the stage playing keyboard and violin, singing songs and telling stories in a voice electronically modified to transform her into characters including a Russian troll, a naive young man, a Trump devotee, Lou Reed and even God. But if its predecessor held up an ironic mirror to America in the early 1980s, ARK is both more universal (climate change affects us all) and more personal (this time many of the stories are autobiographical).

For instance, she describes how her Swedish grandfather painted a rosy picture of a childhood culminating in his marriage at ten years old. When Anderson decided to investigate, she discovered a much sadder truth. After Axel’s mother died, his drunken father sent him to an orphanage where conditions were as harsh as the worst prison. And as though to honour her uncle’s dreams, she asked AI to create a set of photographs (which are hilarious) showing him enjoying the happy childhood he invented.

Meanwhile the clock to Armageddon is ticking, time is of the essence and things are speeding up. “It seems breakfast happens every quarter of an hour,” says Anderson. And as though determined to remind us of our doom, clocks speeding forwards or backwards are a repeating motif. “Even the jokes are getting shorter,” remarks Anderson and while a skeleton dances on the giant screen, she gives us an example. “A skeleton goes into a bar. ‘Give me a beer and a mop,’ he says.”

This ambitious project was completed before last week’s American election and, even as I write, Anderson is responding to the outcome by introducing new elements. It can make ARK feel a bit like a work in progress – sometimes haphazard, but always fresh. In 2016 Yoko Ono responded to Donald Trump’s election with a blood-curdling scream. Anderson describes it as “a bloody-murder, death scream from Hell” and invites us all to let loose and scream our heads off, which we do with gusto.

In a man’s voice she intones “What’s happening now doesn’t seem to be very real. It’s like waking up in somebody else’s very dark dream.” Euphoric shots of rockets zooming up through gracious clouds precede comic book drawings of rocket launches and intergalactic warfare. “After the election we had to go somewhere,” she says. “Mars seemed like the best option. It’s a beautiful planet and now we know so much about taking care of planets, we’re going to take care of Mars,” she continues – while standing on the red-hot planet (thanks to video projection).

The big screen visuals are stunning. Among the funniest are Elon Musk as a child in a playroom surrounded by toy rockets and AI footage of Anderson interviewing a cigar smoking Sigmund Freud in a Viennese cafe. “I admire you because you take dreams seriously,” she tells him. “In my dreams I see myself,” comes the reply.The darkest section is of Anderson reading an extract from God’s diary, which has mysteriously come into her hands. He directs the faithful to annihilate their enemies: “Burn them. And do this in My name,” she reads while, on screen, we see images of bombed out buildings in Palestine. “We will hit you in ways you can’t imagine,” she adds in the words of Donald Trump.

The subject matter is often dire, but Anderson’s creative wizardry lightens the gloom. It can take the form of a jacket that when tapped, thumped or jerked, emits clicks and bleeps, or daft footage of an unsuccessful clone designed to do her work for her while the young Laurie dashes about doing one interview after another.

But clouds win the day; fluffy white cumulus clouds scud across impossibly blue skies, roiling grey clouds churn and tumble in presage of disaster and, during the interval, the cloud that hovered overhead at the beginning of the show is transformed into the mushroom cloud of nuclear annihilation.

But don’t be downhearted is the message; despite it all there’s room for optimism. “The reason we’re here is to have a really, really, really good time” says Anderson and finishes by leading us all in a session of Tai Chi.

It's no mean feat to keep an audience mesmerised for three hours. When I travel to Mars, I hope Laurie Anderson will be on the same flight. I’d happily spend nine months listening to her regaling me with stories, even the gloomy ones. 

• ARK: United States V by Laurie Anderson at Aviva Studios Manchester on 15,16 and 20-24 November
• More visual arts reviews on theartsdesk