Musician and experimental performance artist Laurie Anderson's latest project, Delusion, has its world premiere Feb. 16 in Vancouver. (Pomegranate Arts)

When Laurie Anderson describes her new show, Delusion, as a bargain-basement Avatar, she's only joking. If you think about it, though, the category-defying U.S. musician and performance artist has always been a kind of avant-garde James Cameron. Like the Avatar director, Anderson is an unabashed tech geek who can't resist using the latest technology – or inventing her own – in order to tell a tale.

'For a period of time, I was having a dream festival every night. They were such odd stories. I was writing them down for a while, and they found their place in Delusion.'

— Laurie Anderson

Talking to her about Delusion, which has its world premiere Feb. 16 at the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad, I remind her that, in an interview five years ago, she told me she was trying to pare down her performances and make them less tech-heavy. "Yeah, right," she replies with an embarrassed chuckle, like a kid caught with her hand in the electronic cookie jar. "Now, I've pared things back up."

This work, still in progress as she spoke by phone from her New York studio, is a dense collection of mini-plays and musical sections performed by Anderson with two backup musicians and a laptop's worth of imagery and effects.

"I've got lots of little keyboards and pedals all over the stage, along with a bunch of screens of different shapes," she says with relish. These "screens" include crumpled paper, a couch and other three-dimensional objects on which Anderson projects images. "It makes for this kind of funny 3-D world. Not exactly Avatar – a poor man's Avatar," she laughs.

If Anderson doesn't have Cameron's blockbuster budget, she's certainly a more sophisticated storyteller. No tired "noble savage" clichés for her. Delusion is a meditation on self-perception that employs a series of 28 bite-sized scenes to explore how we use stories to define ourselves. "There are stories about strange places that I've been," she says, "about dogs, priests, elves, parents, mothers, donkeys…"

Anderson performs at a Tibet House Benefit Concert at Carnegie Hall in New York. (Scott Wintrow/Getty Images)

Anderson also draws upon her own vivid dreams. "For a period of time, I really was having a dream festival every night," she says in her engagingly emphatic style. "They were such odd stories. I was writing them down for a while, and they found their place in Delusion."

The 62-year-old artist has also created a male alter ego who shares the narration with her. He's a creaky, Chaplinesque historian named Fenway Bergamot, a character that grew out of past experiments with vocal distortion, such as the masculine clone in her 1987 TV spoof What You Mean We? Playing Fenway "really frees me," Anderson says. "Any kind of stupid thing that I wouldn't do in front of people, I can have Fenway do."

We can also expect Fenway to indulge in some socio-political commentary. This wouldn't be an Anderson show without it. She's been taking the pulse of her country for most of her career – from her 1980s multimedia epic United States I-IV right up to the songs and raps on her 2007-08 Homeland tour, which included a needle-sharp satire of punditry, Only an Expert.

"When I start things, I'm often thinking, 'This is going to avoid politics,' but that's impossible! It just keeps intruding. Not intruding," she corrects herself, "it's life, and I try to write about life."

Although Anderson first gained fame outside art circles as a musician, with her unlikely 1981 hit single O Superman and her star-studded art-rock album Mister Heartbreak (1984), narrative has always played a major role in her work.

"My first love really is words," she says. She indulged her taste for literature in her opera Songs and Stories From Moby Dick (1999-2000), and Delusion was also inspired by classic storytellers, notably Honoré Balzac, Laurence Sterne and Yasujiro Ozu. From French novelist Balzac, Anderson borrows the use of inanimate objects or meteorological events to link different human stories. From Ozu, the sublime Japanese filmmaker of Tokyo Story fame, she takes a passion for intimate family drama. "He's like a miniaturist, really," she says. "He tells these small and very devastating stories."

It's Sterne, however, who is her biggest influence. The 18th-century comic novelist, whose Tristram Shandy is the ancestor of modern meta-fiction, delights her with his endless diversions. "I love following a thread along until it just becomes as crazy as it can be. And he's the master of that kind of storytelling."

Still, there will be plenty of music between the words in Delusion. Anderson will be wielding her trusty violin and jamming withEyvind Kang on viola and Colin Stetson on reeds.

Anderson's husband, musician Lou Reed, left, acted as her sounding board during the creation of Delusion. (Josep Lago/AFP/Getty Images)

They aren't the only musicians joining Anderson in Vancouver. Her husband, rock legend Lou Reed, is also in the entourage, with an Olympiad gig of his own. He'll be contributing to producer Hal Willner's Neil Young tribute concert (Feb. 18 and 19). Anderson says Reed has been her sounding board during the creation of Delusion. "He's helped me edit it, and he's a really great critic. He'll say, 'Take that out; that's just way too meandering.' Or, 'Leave that in; it's meandering in such a nice way'." Reed also came up with the name Fenway Bergamot.

Delusion was co-commissioned by the Cultural Olympiad and London's Barbican Centre, where it will play this April. Anderson will also be taking the show to Paris and Uppsala, Sweden, after its Vancouver premiere. An album of music from both Delusion and Homeland is due out in the spring from Nonesuch Records.

This is the first time Anderson has done a commissioned work for the Olympics. However, she was involved in planning the much-admired opening ceremonies for the 2004 Summer Olympic Games in Athens. She was the lone U.S. member of the committee and says working with her Greek teammates left her in awe. "They were the smartest people I'd ever met in my life. I thought, Well, they are the descendants of the people who invented everything – geometry, poetry, physics and so on. But it was shocking to be in a room with people who would look at problems from angles you'd never even considered."

High praise coming from Anderson, who trades in artistic shifts of perception. We'll have to forgive her, though, if she hasn't yet scoped out all the angles of Delusion. "You know how you work on something, where you get an idea of what it should be and then it turns into a million little pieces that you're working on?" she said. "And how do you sum it up at the end? Well, it'll be summed up when it's done. I haven't seen it yet and neither has anyone else. It'll be a surprise."

Delusion runs at the Vancouver Playhouse as part of the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad, Feb. 16-21.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBC News.