Anohni and the Johnsons — Mourning the Great Barrier Reef review
At the Sydney Opera House, the artist’s last Australian performance became a somber meditation on ecological collapse, despair and complicity.
The show begins with five minutes of churning ocean footage. Then ten. Still no one on stage. No band, no Anohni, not even an apologetic roadie fiddling with cables. Just a giant screen of rolling water. The crowd sat silently, quite unsure of what to do, but sensing that this was the appointed time to act reverent and suppress the urge to chitchat.
When Anohni finally appears — draped in white, bathed in aquatic light — the images behind her switch to coral. Dead coral. Bleached reefs. Slow, sad shots of what used to be the Earth’s underwater cathedral. It felt less like a performance and more like a wake, the first of two Vivid Live shows that doubled both as art and mourning ritual.
Anohni has never done apolitical. Born in England, she broke out in the New York underground scene in the early 1990s, then performing as Antony with her band The Johnsons. They won the Mercury Prize in 2005 for I Am A Bird Now, a tender, strange album about identity and fragility. She’s since collaborated with Lou Reed (who called her an “angel”), Rufus Wainwright, and Björk. In 2016, she came out publicly as transgender.
That same year she released her critically lauded ecofeminist album HOPELESSNESS, a fatalistic record that confronted despair at every angle: American war crimes, the surveillance state, ecological collapse. All with a voice that sounds like it shouldn’t be singing about any of those things. Which is, of course, the point. There is something brutally effective about hearing a woman who sounds a bit like Nina Simone spitting tirades against child molesters and Barack Obama’s kill list.
This Opera House show felt like a logical continuation of HOPELESSNESS’s rage, but delivered with more gravity and less heat. A few weeks earlier, Anohni had travelled with a documentary crew to Lizard Island — a fragile strip of reef off Queensland’s coast — to shoot footage and speak with scientists tracking its demise. She came back with interviews, underwater cinematography, and a sense of grief baked into every arrangement.
The Great Barrier Reef, often described as the ocean’s Amazon, has endured six mass bleaching events in nine years. Between songs, a chorus of scientists — like Dr Anya Salih, John ‘The Godfather of Coral’ Veron, Professor Tony Larkum and Dr Lyle Vail — reminded us in the interstitial video segments that coral reefs support about a third of all marine species. They’re vital carbon sinks. Once they go, everything else begins to slide.
It could all have veered into sanctimony — and sure, there’s a whiff of contradiction in an international artist with a touring entourage preaching climate emergency (Anohni has acknowledged this herself, calling these her final Australian shows as touring with a large group of musicians is not “environmentally tenable ”anymore).
But Mourning the Great Barrier Reef didn’t feel moralising. It felt elegiac. The visuals — shoals of fish swimming through wreckage, anemones pulsing like alien hearts, the whole reef flickering between vibrant life and total collapse — said more than polemic ever could. Dr Salih, who studies reef fluorescence, offers the night’s most human-sized advice: “Find the place in nature that you love. Go to it and think of it as your kin.”
The music was exceptional. Anohni’s band — a seasoned ensemble including Leo Abrahams (guitar), Jimmy Hogarth (guitar), Max Moston (violin), Gael Rokotondrabe (piano), Christopher Valataro (drums), Doug Wieseman (saxophone), Julia Kent (cello) and Sam Dixon (bass) — skew older, lending a gravitas to the arrangements. Songs from HOPELESSNESS, originally glitchy, snarling, electronic broadsides were pulled apart and rebuilt in warm orchestral layers. ‘It Must Change’ and ‘4 Degrees’ no longer sound like club anthems for the end times. They sound like grieving.
Anohni herself remains a riveting performer without doing very much. There’s something old school diva in her presence — she totters like Judy Garland and grimaces like Edith Piaf, her face contorting with emotion as though physically working through each note. Her voice, meanwhile, does everything: operatic and trembling, stately and scorched, often in the same line. When she sang “No one’s getting out of here / That’s why this is so sad”, the room all but stopped breathing.
But the show’s most gutting moment came during “4 Degrees.” “I want to see this world / I want to see it boil,” Anohni sang, cataloguing the species doomed by our inaction — dogs, lemurs, rhinos. The implication wasn’t subtle: This is not someone else’s problem. This is us. Now.
Not everything lands. Some of the silences drag. People often don’t know when to applaud. But maybe that’s intentional. Most concerts are about escape. This one was about presence. If art is meant to make you feel something — shame, awe, despair, ideally all at once — then Mourning the Great Barrier Reef succeeds wildly. As I overheard one of the scientists mutter on the way out: “That was just fantastic.”
Anohni and the Johnsons will play the Concert Hall at the Sydney Opera House for Vivid LIVE on Tuesday, May 27.
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