Adelaide Reviews

When Claudia Rankine was approached by Peter Sellars about writing a script for a show about the Black Pearl, as Joséphine Baker was known by her Parisian audience, at first she was repelled. A show about a black woman who danced and sang for her French, and later German, audiences, clad only in bananas? But eventually Sellars convinced Rankine, who is also black, that there was more to Josephine Baker than that. Here was a woman who during the war worked for the French Resistance and survived, later being awarded the Legion d’Honneur by General De Gaulle. Here was a woman who adopted twelve orphans from different racial backgrounds, bringing them up in different religions, to demonstrate the possibility for universal brotherhood. And here was a woman who was asked to lead the civil rights movement in America after the assassination of Martin Luther King.

The resulting show, Perle Noire, however, focusses less on Baker’s quite stupendous achievements, and more on her sense of being humiliated as a black girl during her childhood in America, which stayed with her all her life. We are given, not a survey of her life, but rather a glimpse into Baker’s psyche.

The stage is almost entirely occupied by the 6 musicians who play Tyshawn Sorey’s incredible score. Centre stage is a short staircase leading to a screen on which shadows of Julia Bullock, the singer who represents Baker, are displayed. Bullock walks up and down this stage for the almost 2 hours of the show, and despite this extremely minimalist staging she holds the audience in the palm of her hands throughout. Near the start of the show she denounces the barbaric nature of America in a speech which had the audience murmuring approval in the light of the events of recent days! (Like Baker, Sellars is a disaffected expatriate American.) At a certain point Bullock removes her upper garment, and remains in a state of veiled semi-nakedness for the rest of the show. But most of the show consists of long songs, mostly delivered at a slow, almost meditative pace, which Bullock sang with extraordinary expressive power. From the first song, Blackbird, through songs about the Africa she never saw, her love-life in Paris, her abasement during the German occupation, to black civil rights, the subjects of these songs gave vignettes into different parts of Baker’s life, Bullock's gorgeous, velvety voice has a huge range, which was richly exploited by Sorey’s music.

Tyshawn Sorey’s score towers over this show. I was expecting the music to be based on the songs that Baker sang – cabaret, French jazz, and so on. But no, the music was all newly composed, and had the function of underlining Baker’s state of mind. It portrayed this so well that I felt it was almost redundant that the words of the show took one again and again into the sphere of the humiliations that this black American woman suffered just from being black. It is music’s special power to take one into areas of the psyche inaccessible to words.

Sorey plays percussion and piano in the show himself, using a vast range of dynamics, from whispers on metal percussion to devastating blows on the bass drum and, once, on the tam-tam. And the music he wrote for the other instrumentalists is virtuosic in the extreme. He makes huge demands on his violinist, Jennifer Curtis, especially in double-stopping all over the instrument, and also on the saxophonist, Travis Laplante. On the other hand, the guitar part, played by Dan Lippel, is one of the most self-effacing that I have ever come across. But he must know the capabilities of these particular players, for they all played brilliantly and seemingly without effort.

Often the instruments are involved in intimate dialogue with the protagonist, whom Sellars gives them the opportunity from time to time to approach physically. Particularly touching were the duets between Bullock and the flautist, Alice Teyssier, and later the bassoonist, Rebekah Heller. In the finale, after the utter collapse of Baker, all four of these musicians surround her, and play a threnody which is the only passage of music in the whole show in a simple tonal idiom.

I would have liked the show to focus a little more on Josephine Baker’s exploits as part of the French resistance, and also her humanity-healing work with her family of orphans. But then, I am not black, and the issue of black people being regarded as second-class citizens, if that, is still with us. And it is one of the powers of theatre to address, and attempt to redress, injustices of the present. So I really take my hat off to this extraordinary show and everyone involved in its creation.