Black Pearls
Reviews and Reflections from Adelaide Festival 2026 (3)
Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine
Peter Sellars/Julia Bullock/Tyshawn Sorey/International Contemporary Ensemble
Her Majesty’s Theatre
Adelaide Festival
1–3 March
Tyshawn Sorey: Alone
Her Majesty’s Theatre
Adelaide Festival
2 March
*
Her Majesty’s Theatre in Adelaide was originally built in 1913 and named the New Tivoli Theatre as part of the nation-wide Tivoli vaudeville circuit (which among other things included black-and-white minstrel shows). After successive renovations little remains of its former Edwardian art nouveau glory apart from the façade, and sadly there’s little sense of history or theatre ghosts once one enters the auditorium.
Something similar might be said of Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine, a pointed and somewhat reductive homage to Joséphine Baker, the pioneering Black vaudeville dancer, singer, actor, member of the French Resistance and civil rights activist who left the United States for Paris in 1925 and spent most of her subsequent life and career in France, largely because she had more artistic and social freedom there and could play to more racially mixed audiences.
Julia Bullock is a Black American singer with a primarily classical and operatic background who was told as a student that she resembled Baker and subsequently began incorporating the latter’s songs into her repertoire and researching her history. Both were born in St. Louis, Missouri and like most African Americans experienced discrimination in their lives and work; activism is an essential component in their careers; and both are uniquely compelling performers; but otherwise they arguably have little in common as artists.
Baker was essentially a Jazz Age popular vaudeville entertainer who initially made her impact as a wild, raunchy, loose-limbed and ‘exotic’ dancer wearing outrageous costumes – most famously her banana-belt skirt (and sometimes little else) – and often accompanied onstage by a pet cheetah who frequently escaped into the orchestra pit and terrorised the musicians; she later became a singer with a distinctively light, trilling and decidedly French-sounding voice, and appeared in a series of French films in the 1930s that captured her act at its peak.
During the Second World War she was a spy for the French Resistance, writing down information on sheet music and smuggling it abroad in her underwear. After the war she returned periodically to the United States, where she refused to play to segregated houses, was accused of being a Communist, had a file taken out on her by the FBI, and participated in the March on Washington, where she spoke alongside Martin Luther King while wearing her Free French uniform and medal of the Légion d’honneur (she was the only official female speaker, but acknowledged fellow activists Rosa Parks and Daisy Bates who were both present and invited them to speak).
She also married four times, had relationships with men and women – allegedly including Colette and Frida Kahlo as well as other Black female vaudeville artists like Clara Smith and Ada ‘Bricktop’ Smith – and later in life (with her fourth husband, who was also gay) famously adopted and raised her ‘Rainbow Tribe’ of twelve children from various racial and cultural backgrounds.
Much of this is glossed over, assumed or only glancingly referred to in Jamaican-American poet and playwright Claudia Rankine’s text for the show, which basically takes the form of a non-chronological and somewhat didactic poetic monologue interspersed with quotes from Baker; the songs in the show likewise incorporate fragments of lyrics (and music) from some of Baker’s most famous songs as well as others (including most effectively for me the spiritual ‘My Father How Long’).
To some extent the lack of biographical detail in the text deliberately blurs the distinction between Baker and Bullock – and implicitly invokes the lived experience of all racial minorities and colonised peoples – as well as between past and present racial injustice in the United States. However for me it had the effect of becoming somewhat generalised and even monotonous – as did the relentlessly solemn mood and glacial pace of the show (directed by Peter Sellars), which at times became almost inert (and about as far removed from Baker’s own performances as can possibly be imagined).
Contemporary jazz and multi-genre composer (and multi-instrumentalist) Tyshawn Sorey’s score (and arrangements) went some way towards rectifying this, but despite the odd angry cymbal crash or Afro-Latin rhythm the overall vibe was similarly cerebral; and the sombre lighting only added to the sense of the show being more of a dirge than a celebration of Baker’s life and achievements.
Like Bullock and Baker herself, Sorey is a formidable musician and stage presence (here he plays percussion and piano), and his fellow musicians (an eclectic ensemble featuring violin, flute, bassoon, saxophone and electric guitar, and unlike Baker’s typical jazz band in Paris, mostly White) were likewise highly accomplished, but for me the music never came alive, especially when attempting a popular genre like Afro-Latin or the blues. The most awkward moment for me came towards the end, when the musicians played what sounded like an Irish folk lament over Bullock/Baker’s inert body; perhaps the irony was intentional, but I found it hard to imagine a more sentimental or inappropriate send-off.
As for Bullock herself: wisely, she doesn’t attempt to impersonate Baker, but is a mesmerising performer in her own right, with an incredible (but inescapably operatic) voice. Her spoken-text delivery is similarly riveting; and her sense of connection with the material is palpable.
She’s also an accomplished and expressive mover: for me the strongest moment in the show was her silent, unaccompanied ‘deconstructed Charleston’ (choreographed by Michael Schumacher), in which familiar movement phrases and gestures from Baker’s ‘danse sauvage’ were isolated and parodied before finally giving way to a more primal, animalistic crawl reminiscent of Chiquita the cheetah but suggestive of something even more dangerous and primal. However, as with the text and music, the overall tone of her performance and the choreography was highly controlled – and again, very much the opposite of Baker’s own.
To be sure, all of this was undoubtedly intentional: text, music and production are a self-declared ‘deconstruction’ of Baker’s image as a performer, which is treated as having been entirely ‘constructed’ for a White audience; and there are certainly aspects of that image that seem problematic to us today. However even a cursory view of footage on YouTube (not to mention her work as an activist) suggests that alongside the undeniably racist, colonialist and sexist motifs in her routines, Baker was not merely a victim or fellow traveller but (like many of her Jazz Age peers) a uniquely gifted, committed, courageous and autonomous artist, and that her work was full of subversive wit, energy, intelligence and joy.
Above all, she was sexy and trangressive: those bananas were not just ‘exotic’ decoration; and it’s no coincidence that the fluttering hand gestures of the ‘danse sauvage’ were later taken up by the queer New York underground dance scene and became part of the rhetoric of voguing (not to mention more mainstream figures like Madonna or Beyonce). Indeed the queer and camp elements in Baker’s life and art – which seem to me an essential dimension to her work and influence – are conspicuously absent from the show.
Dare one suggest that Sellars, Bullock, Rankine, Sorey and Schumacher are a little out of touch and even disdainful of popular culture from the heights of their rarified world in opera and classical music, contemporary dance, theatre, poetry, academia and ‘free’ jazz?
More seriously Black Pearl raises interesting questions about what might be called (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) a less frequently identified form of ‘cultural appropriation’ – namely across the lines of status and class – as well as the ‘appropriation’ of another artist’s work and life (which a work of ‘high art’ like Black Pearl is arguably just as guilty of as a Hollywood bio-pic), or more generally what it means to represent someone else or speak on their behalf, personally or politically. For example Bullock writes of Baker in a program note that the show is ‘not so much about her, but for her’; while Rankine puts the following words (also quoted in the program) into Bullock/Baker’s mouth:
‘In truth, I wanted to be taken. / What object doesn’t want a home / in the hands, inside the applause / inside the imagination of everyone…/ The trick is to make you believe that this girl you desire / isn’t already yours. If you want me then I am yours. / It never feels like a performance. I’m invisible if no one is here…/ Do you fully know that what is missing in me / was taken from me by you before either of us arrived here? / Do you understand that nothing but loss defines our union? …/ I understand that I am a package / that’s been ripped opened / and devoured / like a box of chocolates…/There’s a word for how I feel, / for how I’ll feel tomorrow / when you’re gone… / It translates into the empty behind my eyes… / It doesn’t matter. I didn’t matter / even when I painted this face black / so they thought me white, even then, / onstage, the body they saw / didn’t have me in it.’
This strikes me as being not only presumptuous but singularly untrue to Baker, not only in its self-pity, but in its misunderstanding of the nature of performance, including her use of blackface (in fact she more famously often wore whiteface, not in order to assimilate, but on the contrary as a satirical clown, anticipating Genet’s later use of whiteface on Black actors in his play The Blacks; she also ran a cosmetic line in skin-darkening rather than skin-lightening lotion in Paris in the 1930s).
More generally, one might ask, who is really speaking here? Baker, or Bullock, or Rankin? Indeed there’s a sense throughout the show that the performer (and lurking behind her the playwright) is less like an advocate or medium than a ventriloquist, using Baker as their doll.
A more interesting, equitable, honest and revealing approach might have involved an imaginary dialogue between Bullock and Baker (or at least Bullock’s idea of Baker) – perhaps comparing the former’s relationship with opera and the latter’s relationship with vaudeville; a similar dialogue might have existed between Sorey’s music and Baker’s – including the composers who wrote for her, some of whom were Black as well.
Artists and entertainers are always working within the given circumstances of their time and place, as creatively – and I would argue in Baker’s case as subversively – as they can. Ideally, they also work in collaboration with each other. By doing so across genres, across cultures, and even across time and space, they can transcend those limits; including the limits of the self.
As can we all.
*
Sorey’s one-off solo recital at the Maj, Tyshawn Sorey: Alone, was a very different and for me much more satisfying experience. Unlike Perle Noire, it even managed to raise a few ghosts, despite the renovations to the theatre. In fact the atmosphere felt somewhat like a séance even before the show even started.
A grand piano with its lid removed had been placed centre stage and turned ninety degrees to face the audience in a single blue spotlight. Sorey entered and sat down behind it like a medium at a table.
He’s a giant of a man, and something of a giant on the contemporary music scene: Pulitzer Prize-winner, McArthur ‘Genius’ Fellow and a recipient of many other honours, he’s known for crossing musical boundaries and incorporating improvisation into his compositional practice. As an instrumentalist he began as a trombone player before transitioning to jazz drumming and piano; he also has a stated commitment to changing perceptions of Black and Afrodiasporic music.
In this case, he basically he improvised at the piano for an hour to create what felt like a single unbroken wave of sound. In comparison with Perle Noire, the music was infinitely more varied in range, dynamics, pace, genre, emotion and even (despite the solo instrument) texture; at times he coaxed extraordinary sounds from inside the piano by reaching forward and plucking the strings.
The recital began slowly and quietly somewhat in what felt like the realms of classical music and particularly Impressionism: to my ears, the opening chords had echoes of Debussy’s ‘Sunken Cathedral’. However, there’s considerable cross-influence between Impressionism and jazz, so we were already in the liminal state of what Sorey prefers to call ‘mobility’ rather than using terms like ‘hybrid’, ‘crossover’ or ‘fusion’.
What followed was a journey into unknown territory through increasingly dark, tempestuous and occasionally atonal realms (much like a Mahler slow movement in fact) that made me think at times of Bartok, Schönberg or Messiaen but also Ornette Coleman. ‘Free jazz’ might be one way to describe what we heard, but for me it transcended genre and language – verbal or musical – and became a deeply personal, meditative and even spiritual experience.
Compared to the famous solo improvisation recitals of Keith Jarrett, Sorey’s process feels much more experimental and free-flowing. Despite my clutching at evanescent classical or jazz analogies, there are fewer hand-rails to guide us, less repetition, less rhythmic pulse, less grounding in traditional tonality.
As such Sorey’s notion of musical ‘mobility’ also arguably has a cultural and even political dimension. It avails itself of whatever is at hand, but in a profound sense it refuses to be identified.
At the same time, there’s something deeply grounded in his improvisational process that doesn’t seem to refer so much to externalities, but to something intimate and mysterious that nevertheless communicates itself to something similar inside us, if we’re open to it.
The entire recital had a circular structure, returning at the end to a murmuring oscillation similar to the one with which we began. It reminded me of the opening moments of Mahler’s 9th Symphony, or perhaps more simply a heartbeat.
As T. S. Eliot wrote in The Four Quartets, ‘in my beginning is my end’.
On the other hand, as my former compatriot Wittgenstein famously wrote: ‘Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.’ Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one should remain silent.
*
Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer and critic in Boorloo/Perth, Western Australia. He was born in Lower Flügelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. After finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of Lower Flügelhorn he completed his doctoral thesis at Cambridge on the later Wittgenstein and the phenomenology of language games (Der später Wittgenstein und die Phänomenologie den Sprachspielen, unpublished) under the supervision of Wittgenstein’s literary executor Elizabeth Anscombe, whose famous paper ‘The First Person’ argues that the pronoun ‘I’ does not refer to anything. On returning to Austria he was the lead singer and flugelhorn player in Viennese prog-rock/jazz-fusion band The Flaming Squirrels (Die Flammende Eichhörnchen), in which capacity he was notorious for his unusual dance moves and unorthodox flugelhorn technique. He left Austria and went into voluntary exile in 2000 after the formation of the far-right coalition federal government, vowing never to return. Professor von Flügelhorn is currently editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flügelhorn where he holds a remote chair in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He is also the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations), Unzeitlich Sein (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), some of which have been translated into English by his friend and colleague Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.