Laurie Anderson conjures up new parables from `Nerve Bible’

Ancient Czech cave drawings by blind women. Hawaiian hollow-log drum schools that occasionally teach hula. Oujia boards that spell out your past lives. These are the tools of Laurie Anderson’s trade.

No, she didn’t have them with her onstage last night at the Maine Center for the Arts, where she animatedly read portions of her forthcoming book “Stories From the Nerve Bible.” But she conjured up these and many other images in spirit through the wry words, music and synthesizations that have made her internationally famous for more than a decade.

Anderson’s two-hour show, which she compared to a “radio play … you might hear on a long, cross-country road trip,” took a nearly full house of willing passengers on a ride through the mental landscape of America’s leading multi-media performance artist.

A compilation of autobiographical recollections and commentaries, the work began with Anderson recalling when she was 10 and her holy-roller grandmother said the world would end in a year. Anderson got busy reading the Bible and isolating herself from friends and family. Then the day arrived. “I was ready,” she said. “But nothing happened.”

Her narrative moved from vignettes of travels, to a recipe for “Hotel Hot Dogs” (bratwurst fried on an electrical chord), to reflections on the Gulf War and a plea for a wise old woman to join a regular newscast and give her analysis of world affairs.

As a child, Anderson was told the fantastic Bible stories of parting oceans and talking snakes, and was struck by the seriousness with which adults considered them. To her, the tales were a “local form of surrealism” that ultimately inspired her “artist-as-spy” career of asking the question, “What’s actually true and what’s an art form?”

In a mellifluous, miked voice, Anderson read her stories and accompanied herself with sounds and music on a keyboard, or on her signature electric violin-type thingamajig. Occasionally, she would speak into an alternate mike that made her voice itty bitty like a girl’s or deep and low like a man’s or just plain indescribably weird.

Except for a brief break that she took while showing segments of her film “Carmen” (a radical rewrite of Bizet’s opera), Anderson sat at her control booth of machinery. She would occasionally lift a graceful hand in some explanatory motion, but mostly she performed a dance of pushing buttons, shifting mikes, and mixing sounds to create dense jungles, cavernous echoes or alarming sirens. She would pull the audience in with everyday absurdities, such as a VCR clock that always flashes noontime, and then wax philosophical by asking, “Is time long or is it wide?”

Eclectic in everything she does, Anderson was part stand-up comic, part cynic, part cultural commentator, part technoqueen. Above all, however, Anderson was storyteller, a poet who turns the screw on the practices and pathos of our times.