American artist and musician Laurie Anderson is one of the curators of this year's New Zealand Festival of the Arts.
For it, she has assembled a 'crazy array of things' including a concert for dogs and a sound installation created with feedback from the guitars of the late rocker Lou Reed – Anderson's long-term partner and collaborator.
She tells Kim Hill she feels unchanged by the decades that've passed since she performed at the 1986 NZ Festival of the Arts.
Laurie Anderson Photo: supplied/ Ebru Yildiz
"I'm trying to learn a few things, but other than that I feel the same as I did when I was, maybe, five."
Anderson believes our minds are very powerful. She has trained hers with the Tibetan Buddhism master Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche.
In an award-winning 2015 documentary about her beloved terrier Heart of a Dog, Anderson paraphrased Rinpoche – 'One should learn how to feel sad without being sad'.
We all need to accept that sad things are a fact of life, Anderson says.
"If you push them away and pretend they're not there, you are an idiot. They're there. So you need to look at them and feel them. But - here's the most important part - do not become sad."
Lolabelle was another one of Anderson's teachers.
'She taught me how to be old. A lot more basking… just basking. She was a lovely creature.'
