Perle noire is the kind of challenging programming that arts festivals should thrive on, although many in Australia seem to be going for easier populist options. This presentation was an examination of the role of black people in a white-dominated society through the person of Joséphine Baker, portrayed in a tour de force by African American soprano Julia Bullock.
Baker was born in St Louis in 1906 and somehow ended up in Paris between the wars, where she enjoyed enormous popular success as a singer and dancer. She is hardly a household name in Australia, and quite a lot of the references would have gone over the audience’s head; a little more explication might have helped.
The set-up comprised a raised platform approached by a flight of steps, opening with Bullock spotlit on the platform, declaiming “Here I am!”. On the stage around her were deployed a pianist-timpanist – in fact, the composer, Tyshawn Sorey – with a guitarist, violinist, flautist, bassoonist and sax player. The opening number was a modern composition Blackbird: “I was living in a country where I was afraid to be black”. This segued into a non-cheerful version of Bye-bye blackbird, one of the songs for which Baker was known.
The programme, directed by Peter Sellars (who has a checkered history with the AF), progressed through a series of snapshots taken from Baker’s life through a combination of modern music with varying degrees of dissonance, non-musical and rather elliptical narrative, such as calling out the names of her twelve adopted children, the “rainbow tribe” – “Were we ahead of our time?”, and incorporating several of the popular songs in Baker’s repertoire (Sous le ciel d’Afrique, Madiana). This was by no means a standard biographical approach; in the programme, Bullock observes “this is not so much about her, as for her”. It managed to touch on many facets of Baker’s life: her success as a performer in Paris, her rather complicated personal life – the children, the husbands, “I bring both men and women to my feet”, her heroic role in the French resistance and award of the Legion of Honour, her part in the American civil rights movement, even her friendship with Princess Grace of Monaco.
This was all presented within a context of ironic commentary on the public perception of Baker and her struggles with society and with herself. At one point, the music moved into a blues mode, at another there were traditional-sounding themes, perhaps alluding to spirituals; none of these genres featured in Baker’s repertoire. The text, by Jamaican born poet Claudia Rankine, makes it clear that “whatever Baker meant to the white people in her audience had little to do with how she herself might be feeling.” Still holding some traction is an idea I found well expressed in a comment on YouTube: “She was allowed to be her Authentic self in France,” something this show does very well to debunk. It makes it quite clear that Baker was giving the white world what it expected, particularly in Bullock’s rendition of Baker’s dancing: she performs an exhausting routine of “primitiveness” – a “deconstructed Charleston” choreographed by Michael Schumacher – becoming more extravagantly a caricature. She subsequently declaims “I RAN though everyone called it dancing.”
Overall this was Bullock’s show – brilliantly sung (mostly not operatically), danced and acted, providing not only a glimpse into the life of Joséphine Baker, but also that of all black women in white society: “I just ask a little happiness on earth.”
