Qui a tué mon père (Who Killed My Father)
Édouard Louis and Thomas Ostermeier
Schaubühne Berlin and Théâtre de la Ville Paris
Dunstan Theatre
Adelaide Festival

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn

 

The title of Édouard Louis’s Qui a tué mon père (Who Killed My Father) – which was published as a book in 2018, adapted for the stage in 2019, and given a new adaptation by the author in collaboration with director Thomas Ostermeier in 2020 – doesn’t end with a question mark. As Louis makes clear in the text, he knows who killed his father: the French governments of Chirac, Sarkozy, Hollande and Macron, and the ruling class interests they served, and continue to serve. By cutting and restricting access to welfare and disability benefits (and humiliating people who rely on them), those governments and presidents (in Louis's words) ‘broke my father’s back all over again’ after he was crippled by an industrial accident, condemning him to work as a street-cleaner ‘bent over all day and cleaning up other people’s trash’. 

 

In fact, Louis’s father is still alive (at time of writing) but even in his late 50s his health is now so severely compromised by heart disease, diabetes and obesity that (as Louis calmly describes in the show) he can barely breathe or walk, let alone leave the house or work. However, Louis is not just talking about literal death – although as he points out at the start of the play (quoting prison abolitionist and scholar Ruth Gilmore) premature mortality is the primary indicator of oppression, whether based on class, race, gender or sexual identity. Rather, his father’s slow but predictably early demise is the symptom of a political and economic system that degrades entire groups of people, including workers, the unemployed and disabled, women, gays, immigrants and people of colour, as well as the vast swathes of rural France collectively known as ‘la France profonde’. 

 

In addition to his autobiographical novels, Louis has also edited a book on the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, whose studies on the embodiment and enactment of class and power, class-based dispositions and habits of thought and behaviour, social and cultural forms of capital, and the symbolic violence imposed by one class on another, all find their parallels in Louis’s own writing. As befits a novelist as well as a playwright (even an autobiographical one) this is strongest when dealing with the minutiae of human interaction without undue emotionalising, intellectualizing, imagery or rhetoric. It adopts the rhythms and syntax of everyday speech, and has what the French critic Roland Barthes called a ‘colourless’ quality that relies on simple and direct language, and doesn’t get caught up in self-pity. 

 

Ostermeier’s elegantly simple staging emphasizes the domestic aspect of a play that primarily consists of a son’s monologue to an absent father (Kafka is the obvious precursor here). Nina Wetzel’s set design consists of a few items of furniture scattered around the stage: Louis’s writing desk with his laptop and a few piles of books and papers is an upstage anchoring-point to which he repeatedly and compulsively returns; an empty armchair downstage facing away from the audience draws his focus whenever he silently contemplates his father or approaches and speaks to him. 

 

At the back of the stage, Sébastien Dupouey and Marie Sanchez’s large-scale black-and-white video projections provide social context as a kind of backdrop with images of an impoverished rural France, including largely empty highways and streets, semi-abandoned towns and villages, desolate fields and smoke-spewing industrial estates. These are interspersed with occasional family snapshots that are also referred to in the text, including an atypical but revealing photo of his father at some kind of celebration dressed in female clothes, makeup and wig; and an equally crucial photo of Louis himself as an 8-year-old dressed in a party hat, Zorro mask and cape while doing a performance of a Celine Dion song in the family living room (which his father ignored before walking out).

 

Louis’s performance in the show as his adult self is remarkably smooth and accomplished, whether delivering text in mostly quiet, undramatic tones, or breaking out into alternately exuberant or desperately attention-seeking lip-synched dance routines to 90s pop songs. These memorably include Britney Spears’s ‘Hit Me Baby One More Time’ and Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’ – the latter in homage to his father, who reluctantly bought him a VHS of The Bodyguard as a childhood birthday present.

 

Ostermeier has Louis using microphones, either hand-held or on stands, which are variously positioned around the stage, including on his desk and nestled in his father’s armchair. While something of a stylistic tic in contemporary German theatre, the device here supports Louis’s intimate tone of delivery while also ironically reinforcing the sense that he’s using a public persona which is to some extent constructed, even when he is ‘playing himself’ (much like the pop stars he lip-synchs, in fact). 

 

The text is in French (with surtitles in English superimposed on the video).  The only exception is a crucial section – which is addressed to the audience rather than to his father – involving an outbreak of family violence, betrayal and complicity on the part of Louis himself, which becomes a kind of confessional, and which he announces will be easier if he tells it to us in English.

 

Louis is at his strongest when writing about his relationships with his father and other members of his family. Here the text has great sociological and psychological acuity, especially when dealing with his father’s toxic masculinity and alcoholism; his mother’s passive aggressiveness and resentment; his parents’ shared homophobia; and his brother’s substance abuse and propensity for violence. There’s also a shift in his father’s attitude later in life towards his son’s sexuality and politics, which suggests some kind of partial reconciliation – although this development is cut short in the final section of the play, which reverts to an attack on individual politicians, and a closing call for ‘revolution’, followed by an abrupt blackout. 

In doing so, Louis abandons the complex story of his relationship with his father and family, in favour of a simplistic, demonstrative and histrionic diatribe that sacrifices his best qualities as a writer and performer. Ostermeier’s staging of this sequence – with Louis donning the party hat, mask and cape of his childhood, pinning up images of the offending politicians on a washing line and throwing handfuls of magic dust at them – is intentionally regressive. It’s as if Louis abandons the attempt to win his father’s love only to install Chirac, Sarkozy and Co. as surrogates, so he can rebel against them in a childish act of insurrection that falls far short of revolution, despite the play’s final rallying cry.

 

Louis’s definition of politics in the play as ‘the government of some people by other people’ confuses the properly structural notion of class with the empirical existence of individuals and groups of people. For example, so-called representatives of la France profonde (from farmers to truck drivers) have taken to the streets of Paris in recent years to contest the legitimacy of the so-called ‘urban elites’ – and have been championed not only by the populist Left but also the far Right. However, such protest movements  – and even so-called 'insurrections' – have been co-opted by a politics of resentment and tribalism that continues to serve the interests of the ruling class. As such, they become a form of anti-politics that pits one group of people against another while business as usual rolls on, leaving the underlying structures of class and power fundamentally intact.

 

*

 

Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer and critic based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born in 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 vocalist and flugelhorn player in Viennese prog-rock/jazz-fusion band The Flaming Squirrels (Die Flammende Eichhörnchen). 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 chair (remotely) 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), all 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.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Private View

Restless Dance Theatre
Odeon Theatre
Adelaide Festival

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn

 

The question of voyeurism is unavoidable for any work that features performers with disabilities. The content of Private View renders the issue even more visible because it deals with the performance of sexuality, desire and fantasy, as well as broader notions of longing for intimacy and love. Dramaturg and creative producer Roz Hervey states in a program note that ‘a range of techniques’ – such as basing the work on research interviews and using character-names – were employed so that ‘the dancers’ lives are not on show’ (in other words, they’re not playing themselves), but this is a slippery distinction in practice, especially for an audience.

 

The issue is openly dealt with by director Michelle Ryan and designer Renate Henschke in terms of how the work is staged. The audience is free to choose either to sit on chairs to one side of the space, or on stools in the centre (I chose a stool). Around us, the action takes place on four raised stages – one ‘act’ at a time, in clockwise rotation – and occasionally spills out amongst us into the centre of the space. Our view of the four stages (artfully lit by Matthew Adey) is initially obscured, either by a projection scrim, venetian blinds, a Perspex wall or translucent curtains, behind which the performers can be dimly seen; but this changes as each ‘act’ begins.

 

All of this effectively sets the scene for a kind of peepshow, while also rendering the audience (at least, those of us seated on stools in the centre) strangely vulnerable. This sense of audience vulnerability is heightened when things are reversed and the performer’s gaze is trained on us – and even more so, when ‘our’ space is invaded, either physically or when we’re directly addressed and asked to respond (all of which is handled with great care, gentle humour and audience-friendliness). 

 

To be sure, none of this ‘absolves’ us of voyeurism, but it foregrounds the issue, and to a certain extent turns the tables. It also raises the question of whether and to what extent vulnerability and even a kind of objectification are inherent in all forms of sexuality, voyeuristic or otherwise. 

 

The theme of the gaze is initially established by the pre-set video projection of a pair of eyes –with blinking, peacock-blue-sequined lids – on the scrim in front of one of the raised stages. This image is replaced once the show begins by a pair of lips (painted with heavy red lipstick) singing the first of a series of entrancing songs by chanteuse-composer Carla Lippis ­– who emerges live during the song in a black velvet catsuit with a Liza Minelli/Sally Bowles bob and makeup. She proceeds to guide us musically as well as visually through the rest of the show, while also serving as a kind of cat-like familiar spirit or shadow for the other performers, most of whom have unspecified disabilities.

 

On the first stage (revealed once the scrim is raised), Michael Hodyl plays a character on an imaginary dinner date, in a sequence which includes some deft dance moves and sly audience interaction. Madalene Macera and Jianna Georgiu provide one of the most arresting images in the show at the start of the second sequence when their hands and pink-painted fingernails frenziedly penetrate the closed venetian blinds that surround the second stage. The blinds open to reveal them cavorting on a bed, flicking through magazines and making calls on pink old-fashioned cradle telephones. Lippis then directs their calls to randomly chosen audience members, who are invited to use her microphone to answer Georgiu’s teasing questions (mine was ‘What does a testicle look like?’). 

 

The third sequence is the most physically, emotionally and visually complex, and involves dancer Bonnie Williams emerging from behind the Perspex wall at the back of the third stage into a kind of open booth to perform an expressive and intimate solo (sensitively choreographed by Larissa McGowan), while Lippis accompanies and shadows her outside the booth. Another of the show’s most striking images involves the singer’s face peering in through a Perspex side wall while a reflection of the dancer’s body extends below her on the inner surface of the wall, in a haunting visual effect made possible by Henschke’s design and Adey’s lighting.

In the fourth and final sequence, Darcy Carpenter, Charlie Wilkins and guest dancer Rowan Rossi (who’s also a dance teacher with the company) perform a comic trio on and around a modular sofa, with Carpenter and Wilkins flirting – initially via text messages (which appear on a screen overhead) and then more physically – while Rossi tries to police their activities but ultimately fails to keep them apart. A closing song from Lippis brings the audience to their feet as lighting transformed the entire space into a communal dance floor, and all distinctions based on ability or disability – or who's watching and who's being watched – finally seem to melt away. 

 

*

 

Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer and critic based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born in 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 vocalist and flugelhorn player in Viennese prog-rock/jazz-fusion band The Flaming Squirrels (Die Flammende Eichhörnchen). 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 chair (remotely) 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), all 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.  

 

 

Grand Theft Theatre

Pony Cam and David Williams
Latvian Hall ‘Tālava’, Wayville
Adelaide Festival

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn

Theatre and live performance have a dual ontology. They exist in the medium of presence – here and now, in this venue, for this duration of time; yet they have an afterlife in memory. They also have a certain duality insofar as they’re both collective and individual forms of experience. I see a show as a member of an audience who shares this experience; yet I also see it from my own perspective, with my own subjective baggage. Finally, I remember it from yet another vantage-point – perhaps differently each time I do so.

 

Most performances are also a representation of something absent: a plot with an imaginary setting, characters and events; or more broadly some kind of performance-text, in the form of a script or score. One might even argue that every performance is shadowed by a kind of Platonic ideal of the work itself: Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring or Pina Bausch’s choreography exist in a kind of eternal presence (or perhaps eternal absence) beyond any individual performance. 

 

Grand Theft Theatre (which was originally commissioned and performed for Melbourne Fringe in 2022) is both a homage to and playful deconstruction of these various dualities. Over the space of an hour and 55 minutes (broken up by three 6-minute intervals), the five members of Melbourne-based collective Pony Cam and collaborator David Williams (former founder of version 1.0 and now artistic director of Alternative Facts) remember and re-enact moments from performances they’ve seen that have had a formative impact on them as audience-members and artists. 

 

Their memories are necessarily partial and unreliable; the re-enactments even more so. There’s much clowning and lo-fi staging, as well as impressive displays of physical skill, moments of pathos and images of beauty (and occasional horror). The show is as much about the failure of representation as it is about the works themselves.

 

On arrival, audience-members are asked to write their own favourite shows on sticky labels; these become talking-points with fellow audience-members during each of the intervals. This generates a sense of appropriately ephemeral community not only amongst the audience but between the audience and the performers. 

 

The community hall setting adds to this non-hierarchical ambience, as does the minimalism and deliberate messiness of the staging. We’re asked to position our own individual plastic chairs (each of which has the name of a well-known or lesser-known theatre-maker attached to it, also written on a sticky label) wherever we choose in the space; these are then moved into new configurations by the performers during each of the intervals. Props, lighting and sound cues are minimal and functional. The performers wear rehearsal clothes (which get progressively more stained during the show); the set is the space itself. 

 

The aesthetics and underlying politics of the work and its makers are influenced by similarly collaborative experimental ‘post-dramatic’ theatre groups like the UK’s Forced Entertainment (whose work is ‘remembered’ by Williams during the performance) or the British-German collective Gob Squad (whose influence is acknowledged in the program). However, you don’t need to be ‘in the know’ about these (or other) theatrical or artistic references to enjoy the show. The overall approach is light-hearted and (in every sense) accessible; as such it also belongs to a more specifically Australian ‘larrikin’ tradition of comedy, circus and physical theatre.

 

Like the material that’s being remembered and re-enacted (which ranges from high-art to popular, mainstage to fringe, international to local) there are high-points and longueurs; no doubt everyone in the audience responded to different sections in different ways (as my conversations with strangers about their own favourite shows during the intervals would seem to suggest).

 

The concept is so rich I found myself wishing for more diversity in the age of the performers (who are mostly in their twenties, except for Williams, who I would guess is in his forties) and the era in which they had most of their formative theatrical experiences (the early 2000s). I also couldn’t help wondering if some of the audience’s favourite theatre memories couldn’t have been communally shared and then spontaneously re-enacted by the performers as well, to broaden the range and break down the hierarchy between performers and audience even further.

In the end, there’s something beautiful about the evanescence of theatre and performance, as well as the unrepeatability of all experience, and even the unreliability of language and memory. This sense of beauty lingers after the show is over, in all its imperfections – like life itself. 

 

In the words of the Elvis song that ends the show and aptly describes all our favourite theatre memories: ‘Love me tender, love me sweet, never let me go. / You have made my life complete, and I love you so.’

 

*

Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer and critic based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born in 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 vocalist and flugelhorn player in Viennese prog-rock/jazz-fusion band The Flaming Squirrels (Die Flammende Eichhörnchen). 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 chair (remotely) 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), all 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.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The 4 Elements
Brooklyn Rider
Perth Concert Hall
Perth Festival

Angelique Kidjo
Perth Concert Hall
Perth Festival

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn

 

*

 

New-York-based string quartet Brooklyn Rider was founded in the early 2000s and loosely named themselves after the Munich-based Blue Rider group of early modernist painters. Comparisons with the Kronos Quartet inevitably suggest themselves: both ensembles practice cross-genre programming, focussing on contemporary and commissioned compositions from around the world in a variety of musical traditions, and juxtaposing these with more established works (mostly but not exclusively from the 20^th Century). Kronos however are arguably cooler and more cerebral in terms of playing style; Brooklyn Rider have a warmer, more emotional approach. Unlike Kronos and most other string quartets, they also play standing up (apart from the cellist), which gives their performances an added sense of energy and embodiment.

 

Perhaps most significantly, however, their programming is based on extra-musical ‘themes’. The title of their current touring program refers to the ancient doctrine of the four elements that compose the natural world: earth, water, air and fire. A more specific contemporary reference (at least in the program notes) is to the theme of climate change, insofar as this has an impact on all four elements: parched earth, rising seas, storms and wildfires.

 

The concert began with a work in the category of ‘earth’: A Short While To Be Here, an arrangement by one of the quartet’s violinists, Colin Jacobsen, of a suite of North American folksongs collected by the pioneering American modernist composer Ruth Crawford Seeger. The title refers to the plaintive words of one of the folksongs: ‘Little Birdie, little birdie, come and sing me your song; / I’ve short time to be here, and a long time to be gone.’ The work was an exquisite reframing of the songs, their simplicity and innocence preserved notwithstanding the addition of more contemporary harmonies and textures, and the fact that they were linked together by more improvisatory-sounding musical connective tissue.

 

The next two short works in the program were new commissions – respectively in the categories of ‘fire’ and ‘air’ – and both were more clearly ‘programmatic’ in terms of their musical language. Massachusetts-born composer Akshaya Avril Tucker’s Hollow Flame is a response to the Californian wildfires of recent years, using sustained and hushed harmonics to suggest the inhalation of oxygen and exhalation of carbon that successively precedes and follows a massive conflagration; Portuguese composer Andreia Pinto Correa’s Aere senza stelle (‘Air Without Stars’) depicted the phenomenon of dust-storms using shimmering clouds of musical particles. Though short in duration and slight in terms of musical form, both works showcased the technical brilliance and flair of the players, as well as their capacity to listen closely to each other, and in turn inspire close listening from the audience.

 

This was followed by another (and more substantial) work of ‘air’ from the 1970s, French composer Henri Dutilleux’s Ainsi la nuit (‘Thus The Night’), a demanding work in seven movements (played without a break). Each movement plays with different sound qualities (harmonics, pizzicatos, extreme contrasts in dynamics or pitch) and uses atonality as well as unfamiliar scales or modes and recurring themes in various stages of development to compel the listener’s attention and play with their sense of memory and anticipation. This for me was musically speaking the most rewarding work in the first half of the concert (if not the entire evening) and took the quartet to another level in terms of precision and acuity. 

 

After interval came another more substantial 20^th Century work of 'fire', Shostakovich’s 8^th String Quartet. Written in the space of three days while the composer was visiting the fire-bombed city of Dresden in 1960, and dedicated ‘to the victims of fascism and war’, the work (like much of Shostakovich’s output) also has deeply personal resonances; legend has it that he was contemplating suicide at the time, and that when the Borodin Quartet first played it to him in private, he buried his face in his hands and wept. 

 

Musically this sense of personal significance is conveyed by the use of the composer’s signature four-note motif – which in its German notation (DSCH) corresponds to the first four letters of Shostakovich’s name in its German transliteration – as the opening theme as well as in every subsequent movement. Other quotations from his oeuvre (including the 1^st Cello Concerto) are scattered throughout the work – all of which might seem to suggest that it was intended to be a kind of musical summation or epitaph.

 

It was given an appropriately fiery performance by the quartet, who rose to a new level of physical and emotional commitment. This was especially true of violinist Johnny Gandelsman (here playing 1st Violin, a role in which he and Jacobsen took turns during the concert); his heartfelt approach to the score (which often pits him as a lone voice against the combined forces of the other three) conveyed a sense of the individual crushed by totalitarianism.

 

The final work on the program – ostensibly in the element of 'water' – was Argentinian-born, US-based Romanian Jewish composer Osvaldo Golijov’s Tenebrae. As the liturgical title suggests, it’s a spiritual work of lamentation that recalls the neo-modal ‘holy minimalism’ of Gorecki’s ‘Symphony of Sorrowful Songs’ (the main theme is almost directly lifted from the second movement of that work). Golijov claims that he was inspired by two contrasting experiences in the year 2000: witnessing the violence in Israel-Palestine at the start of the Second Intifada; and seeing the Earth as if viewed from space at a planetarium in New York. 

 

The work opens and closes peacefully with the main theme repeated and developed over an oscillating drone (suggestive of the view of the Earth from space); the central section however is more fraught with pain, as if conflict becomes more evident as one approaches the Earth more closely. Musically if not thematically the work verges on sentimentality, but in the sensitive hands of the quartet – accentuating the flowing, undulating qualities of the main theme and the ostinato drone – it was a beautifully effective way to close the program. 

 

*

 

Beninese-French singer-songwriter Angelique Kidjo is a true force of nature. Now in her early 60s, her voice is as thrilling and percussive as ever, her dancing as energetic and playful, her enthusiasm as infectious, and her message of empowerment as resounding.

 

In her concert at Perth Concert Hall last Thursday night, she was the embodiment of this year’s Festival theme of Ngaangk (the sun), a female deity in Noongar cosmology who is equally a source of warmth, light, nourishment and protection. Despite the somewhat formal ambience of the venue, by midway through the concert she had us all on our feet dancing and singing along, sometimes in Fon or Yoruba (Kidjo sings in multiple West African and other languages, including French and English).

 

Local Noongar singer-songwriter Maatakitj (alias Clint Bracknell) kicked off the evening with a half-hour set featuring his own brand of desert blues in a series of songs in Noongar language about country, animals, spirits and waterways. He was backed by fellow Noongar artists Della Rae Morrison and Kylie Bracknell (who also provided intros to the songs and encouraged the audience to clap along or click our fingers to mimic the sound of rain). Perth-based percussionist Arunachala played an impressively huge pumpkin drum and provided drive and texture to the sound.

 

After interval, Kidjo erupted onstage, accompanied by a lean but seasoned four-piece band featuring Thierry Vaton on keys, David Donatien on percussion, Gregory Louis on drums and Gregory Louis (outstanding) on bass (the latter featuring plenty of slapping and sliding as well as some chunky melody-lines). Personally, I found the overall mix a bit bland, and would have welcomed a guitar or even a flugelhorn to give things more colour, but this was more than compensated for by Kidjo’s voice, dancing and irresistible charisma.

 

They opened with a hard-driven version of the Talking Heads classic ‘Cross-Eyed And Painless’ from that band’s seminal Afro-beat-based album Remain In Light (which Kidjo recently returned to its African roots in a reimagined track-by-track cover-album of her own). Another song from that album later in the set was ‘Letting The Days Go By’, which in keeping with Kidjo’s predominantly up-beat style felt a lot more light-hearted than the darker, more neurotic and surreal David Byrne original.

 

Songs from her recent album Mother Nature included the title-track, a reggae-based call to action in response to climate change; the joyous ode to the mother continent, ‘Africa, One Of A Kind’; the stirring summons to gender-based solidarity, ‘Choose Love’ (‘Brothers, why are we fighting each other? Sisters, why do we let the men take our power? Let’s be stronger than our fathers!’); the lilting song of encouragement to African self-reliance ‘Do Yourself’; the tighter, bouncier ‘Free and Equal’, juxtaposing words from the US Declaration of Independence and the UN Declaration of Human Rights with the realities of racial injustice highlighted by Black Lives Matter; the seductive dance number ‘Take It Or Leave It’; and the universalist love song ‘Meant for Me’ (‘I don’t care if you’re rich or poor, I don’t know what’s your DNA, I don’t care if your beauty fades, all I know is you’re meant for me’), which had the audience loudly echoing the refrain.

 

Kidjo also paid tribute to the Cuban ‘Queen of Salsa’ Celia Cruz with a sizzling rendition of ‘Bemba Colora’, followed by the slower, more sultry ‘Sahara’ (both sung in Spanish), after sharing a story about being inspired when she was a schoolgirl by seeing Cruz – the first woman she had ever witnessed singing salsa – on tour in Zaire in the 1970s. Later, she delivered a high-energy version of Afro-pop classic ‘Pata Pata’ by another of her role models, the pioneering South African singer and activist Miriam Makeba. Other songs from her own back-catalogue included the rousing hymn to Mother Earth ‘Agolo’ (which brought any remaining stragglers to their feet); and the Afro-Brazilian anthem ‘Afirika’ (which once again had us singing along to the refrain: ‘Ashé é Maman, ashè é Maman Afirika!’). 

 

Encores included a further medley of earlier career hits ‘We We’, ‘Batonga’ and ‘Adouma’, followed by a final speech decrying hatred and racism, before closing with another Afro-pop anthem to solidarity ‘Flying High’ (‘One love, one world, we have to live together’). All in all, it was a night of joy and hope, pride and defiance, and perhaps even a little anger and impatience with the world.

 

*

 

Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer and critic based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born in 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 vocalist and flugelhorn player in Viennese prog-rock/jazz-fusion band The Flaming Squirrels (Die Flammende Eichhörnchen). 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 chair (remotely) 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), all 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.