Josephine Baker was many things: a civil rights activist; a spy for the French resistance; a woman who, born into poverty, became the best-paid stage star in Europe. But before she was any of these, she was an entertainer. So one wonders what on earth she would make of Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine, a turgid 100-minute piece developed by the soprano Julia Bullock, composer Tyshawn Sorey, poet Claudia Rankine and director Peter Sellars.
This was its UK premiere, although Bullock and Sorey have been performing versions of it in the US and elsewhere over the past decade. It isn’t a tribute in the usual sense, but a discourse on racial discrimination, in Baker’s day and our own. Bullock, magnetic as ever, sings and speaks alongside six musicians, who include Sorey himself on piano, drum kit and percussion, plus electric guitar, violin, alto flute, saxophone and bassoon.
On a platform, in front of a saturated square of brightly coloured light, Bullock declaims Rankine’s words and sings Sorey’s music, in which Baker’s songs are deconstructed, reformed, and mostly slowed right down. A riff on Bye Bye Blackbird has guitar and saxophone sounding suspiciously like the playout on a 1980s power ballad. Later, more rewardingly, the guitar gives a highlife flavour to a version of Je t’aime.
But mostly the score is bloated and the instrumental episodes don’t unify the piece so much as draw it out. Ear-splitting bass drum and tam tam indicate emotional climaxes. Everyone is mic’d up, which works against any sense of intimacy.
Surtitles translate the French, laying bare the sentiments that she slipped into unsuspecting ears. One episode alludes to Baker’s famous “danse sauvage”, for which she wore a skirt made of rubber bananas, and almost nothing else. Braless under the sheer fabric at the top of her jumpsuit – and yes, the sight of a woman’s breasts is more transgressive on the Barbican stage today than it was in the Folies Bergères a century ago – Bullock dances, making some of Baker’s grotesquely caricatured “savage” moves, and the effect is properly disturbing.
Here, Perle Noire is hard-hitting. Otherwise, it’s hard going.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
