Womadelaide Day 1 reviews: Friday March 8, 2019
Adelaide’s world music festival launched with a bang on Friday night, and our reviewers saw nearly all of the shows. Here’s their verdict on the acts you shouldn’t miss for the rest of the festival.
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Our glorious world music festival Womadelaide launched with a bang on Friday night, and our reviewers saw nearly all of the shows. Here’s their verdict on the acts you shouldn’t miss for the rest of the festival.
***
Christine and the Queens
France
Foundation stage, one performance only
“This was the best date ever. Call me back. Text me,” Héloïse Letissier tells her adoring fans as she prepares to leave the stage at Womadelaide during her first Australian tour.
For more than an hour the French pansexual popstar Héloïse Letissier — aka Christine and the Queens, or, as of the past few months, Chris — has been wooing a crowd she “can’t see the end of”.
From the opening electro-funk of Comme Si, her energy is contagious.
Chris is brilliantly backed by a four-piece band and six dancers, with whom she bursts into Rhythmn Nation-esque routines, whose moves range from surreal slow motion dancing to full-blown acrobatics.
Chris connects with the crowd telling us her middle name is Adelaide, and sharing her personal story. The tender tale of how she tried for years to fit in until she no longer cared, leaving her more time to “read books”, is the perfect introduction to her hit Titled.
It’s one of the highlights, along with Damn (what must a woman do), with stunning smoke effects, and the ballads 5 Dollars and Paradis perdus — a mash-up of Les paradis perdus and Kanye West’s Heartless.
Mesmerising even when she turns her back to the audience to dance for an extended period, Chris’s vocals are sublime throughout.
A cappella, she engages the crowd in a singalong of Youssou N’Dour and Neneh Cherry’s 7 Seconds, before putting her own seductive spin on INXS’ Need You Tonight as she purrs “There’s something about you boy (pause) girl”.
At the end of the set Chris runs off, before reappearing elevated in the crowd ready for more.
Finishing with high fives and Intranquillité, she dances through her fans back to the stage leaving everyone wanting more. As Chris told us at the start of the set: What a time to be alive.
— Anna Vlach
***
Fatoumata Diawara
Mali
Stage P, March 9, 4pm
The pulsating rhythm from her band propelled Fatoumata Diawara’s performance irresistibly forward.
The Malian singer and guitarist is a force to reckoned with.
Her voice ranges from a low, grainy growl to high pitched shrieks and everything in between. She sings about social, political and humanitarian concerns, including the situation of women and refugees, or nomads as she prefers to call them.
Being Womadelaide the audience not doubt strongly sympathises with the sentiments of her songs, but it’s the rhythm above all that gets everyone moving.
Nina Simone’s Sinnerman was the high point of the performance.
Diawara shed her headscarf and flung her cowry-shell-decorated locks about wildly as the band went crazy.
— Stephen Whittington
***
BCUC
South Africa
Stage TTW, March 9, 4pm and Stage F, March 10, 7pm and Stage MB, March 11, 2pm
Three drums, a bass and enough energy to power every Womad punters’ Lime scooter home — South Africa’s BCUC made sure this year’s festival kicked off with a bang.
With a frontman channelling an equal amount of James Brown and Bob Marley, BCUC brought the beats of Soweto to Botanic Park and the crowd responded by kicking up some good old-fashioned parkland dust.
Singing in Zulu, Sotho and English, this is vibe-lifting music for the masses.
“You have a beautiful thing going on here in Australia,” frontman Jovi Nkosi says.
“Complicated? Yes. But beautiful.”
— Nathan Davies
***
Cool Out Sun
Australia
Stage N, March 10, 8pm and Stage Z, March 11, 1pm
The crowd suddenly swelling, or surging to the front, is sometimes the surest sign you’ve seen a stellar show.
Both things happen at the Moreton Bay Stage for the hip hop and reggae fusion of Cool Out Sun.
Led by the charismatic, ultra-smooth and soulful N’fa Jones, the former 1200 Techniques rapper, scores of punters quickly get to their feet and flock to the front as the four piece barely gets out of first gear.
A few songs later, it feels like the crowd has doubled in about 20 minutes.
With a drummer and bongos everywhere, it’s an undeniably beat-heavy show, as Jones spits rhymes or spins tales about the songs.
“We’re going to celebrate life, celebrate each other,” Jones says.
The show is loose, with Jones admitting the newly formed Cool Out Sun is yet to build a lengthy back catalogue.
“We’ll have to put a 40-minute LP into an 80-minute show, but we’ll make it work,” he quips.
Among the jam sessions and simple “ideas we vibe on”, there are tunes about “the hustle”, to spirituality, knowledge and the human right to food and love.
Expect even bigger crowds at their shows as the buzz builds.
— Ben Cameron
5AngryMen — The Bells
Australia
Stage 2 all weekend
Five men with 11 notes between them; no wonder they look so annoyed.
This is a campanologists’ delight where everyone gets to argue over who played the bum note, leading to brawling and shouted incoherent cursing.
Then, like rats in a wheel, they get back to ringing.
There are thick ropes to send the bell ringers flying high in their rig, but no bells, just two-tone samplers attached to them.
The troupe make great outdoor theatre if you don’t mind the noise.
They arrive in black greatcoats and top hats on bicycles and create with their distracted stares and frenetic energy a sense of greater purpose.
They also play a few tunes and make it look accidental.
— Tim Lloyd
***
Compagnie BiLBobaSSO “Amor”
France
Stage P all weekend
Open fires are not just a place for marshmallows and tall stories, it’s also perfect for intimate, passion- fuelled dancing.
Set in a new area for the festival, Frome Park, tucked away by the all new Botanic High School, a small crowd is entranced by Compagnie BiLBobaSSO.
This apparently married couple attempt to put the spark back in their relationship, literally, with plenty of flames, smoke and sparks dancing at their feet.
There’s little background info available on the duo, in English at least, but the pair sure move gracefully and in time to a myriad of keenly chosen tunes, from classical, French numbers to Elvis.
The stage is a makeshift lounge room, and domestic issues are played out in theatrical, often amusing, style.
There’s even the odd fire cracker and a flame breathing guitar.
One for those who still believe in romance.
— Ben Cameron
***
Amjad Ali Khan & the ASO
Amjad Ali Khan Trio
India / Australia
Stage 2, March 9, 7pm and Stage P, March 10, 5pm
Two great classical musical traditions came together in Samaagam, Amjad Ali Khan’s concerto for sarod and orchestra.
Orchestral musicians would require special training in matters of rhythm and intonation to achieve the ideal integration of these traditions, which is unlikely to happen any time soon.
In the meantime, this was an impressive effort by the ASO under the direction of Luke Dollman.
Amjad Ali Khan is great master of the sarod and a fine singer in the classical dhrupad style too.
His two sons Ayaan and Amaan are impressive artists in their own right.
Supported by splendid tabla playing, they formed a tight knit ensemble at the heart of this performance.
Structured as a garland of ragas, the music moved through a succession of colours and moods, culminating in an exciting series of exchanges between soloists and orchestra, requiring considerable virtuosity on all sides.
— Stephen Whittington
***
Yo, Carmen — María Pagés Compañía
Spain
Stage TTW, March 9, 2pm and Stage 2, 9.30pm
María Pagés is arguably the international queen of modern flamenco, and in Yo, Carmen — I, Carmen — she and her María Pagés Compañía get straight to the point.
It’s about Carmen — radical womanhood if ever there was — pure and simple.
The men — Idiota — are reduced to literal cut-outs.
There is both traditional and modern flamenco, and exciting sequences where the 8-strong company along with live musicians and two cantaora fill the stage.
Pagés is a dominating presence, and her direct address to the audience is a rallying cry to women. (And that on International Women’s Day: a thunderous ovation duly followed.)
The lighting and costuming are exquisite, with both light and darkness used to full and dramatic effect, as are the periodic musical references to Bizet’s score.
And at 80 minutes, a big Womad show indeed.
— Peter Burdon
***
Central Australian Aboriginal Women’s Choir
Australia
Stage F, March 10, 1pm and Stage Z, March 11, 3pm
The chance to hear the age-old living languages of Central Australia is a rare and special event and here, to have them put to work in the mostly western choral traditions is fascinating.
We know when the massed choir of 40 or more are singing “Halleluja” or “Immanuel”, so we hear the missionary influence in words as well as hymn music.
Songs in Western Aranda, the language of Albert Namatjira, have come down from those Hermannsburg missionaries of Central Australia from a century and more ago.
Song Keepers, the documentary of the CAAWC’s return to the homelands of the original German missionaries, showed that the music, in its new form, was also a repository of Lutheranism from another age.
Pitjantjatjara language songs are also here, and in hearing the languages you also come to hear the multilingual nature of life in indigenous society in a region rich in different cultures.
The driving force of the choir remains conductor Morris Stuart, and his direction brings harmony and interest to these admixes of grand cultural traditions.
— Tim Lloyd
***
Las Cafeteras
Mexico / USA
Stage TTW, March 9, 6pm and Stage 2, March 10, 2pm
Las Cafeteras are the real deal in Tex Mex.
For a start they are at Womadelaide to party and they definitely want the crowd to party with them. And we do.
The rhythms are familiar and infectious and the whole crowd is soon yelling “arriba!” and jumping.
The band has a tight rhythm section with up to four of those Mexican folk guitars with varying strings in frenetic agreement.
The singing is pure hip-hop, imploring us to dance, to be part of a world without borders, and to understand the feeling of displacement that the president Trump is giving these born-in-Americans.
When it comes to dancing the push comes to shove and the single flower-decked girl in the flouncy sky blue dress is moving like no high school prom.
When she and the men turn on folksy tapping in salsa time the place really lights up.
— Tim Lloyd
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