PARIS — After decades of Paris, and the world, looking at her, Josephine Baker got to look back. Invoking the cabarets where she performed and the Panthéon where in 2021 she was enshrined as a national hero, a reincarnated Baker made her debut Sept. 9 at the gilded Palais Garnier.
It was not like Paris had ever seen her before. In a radical act of reclamation, a group of Americans — composer/percussionist/pianist Tyshawn Sorey, soprano Julia Bullock, director Peter Sellars, poet/librettist Claudia Rankine, and members of The International Contemporary Ensemble — opened the Paris Opera season with Perle Noire: Méditations pour Joséphine. The piece summons a complicated woman’s inner life and brings a direct reckoning with racism onto an unlikely stage. (This review reflects the performance on Sept. 10).
An iconic Jazz Age entertainer, Baker (1906-1975) fled Jim Crow America and built extraordinary wealth and influence in France, in part by subverting the very system that exoticized her: performing half-naked, sporting the infamous banana skirt, singing of an African “homeland” she had yet to visit.
Sorey’s score empowers her to return the gaze. The avant-garde jazz musician and MacArthur Fellowship recipient created an undulating universe of sound using just six musicians playing piano, a massive percussion set (both performed by Sorey), electric guitar, violin, flute, bassoon, and sax. The score roves seamlessly between composed and improvised music, which, in a program note, Sorey calls “spontaneous music” — ”the most enriching component of music-making.” You could never tell which was which; what you could tell was that the musicians were listening to each other with total presence and intensity.
Sorey deconstructed, often beyond recognition, a suite of show-tune confections Baker performed throughout her career. He cracked them open, poured in reservoirs of emotion, slowed the tempos to draw attention to the text, and blended them with elements of jazz, blues, and spirituals. Baker never sang “Black” music like this; in Méditations, said Sellars in conversation, “the idea was that she got to do all the things she didn’t get to do.”
Bullock, the Grammy-winning singing actress making her own Paris Opera debut, is the prism through which all of this flows. By turns, she drives, presides over, or is overtaken by the music, sustaining nearly two hours without intermission with myriad shadings of face, voice, and movement.
The seeds of the piece go back over a decade to a Juilliard recital for which Bullock first programmed songs associated with Baker; she began researching the figure after a professor told her that, because of her appearance, she’d likely be asked to sing “exotic” repertoire like Baker’s. Both artists were born in St. Louis and built careers as women of color while navigating overwhelmingly white spaces. In a program note, Bullock said Méditations “was in fact not so much about her; it was actually a work especially for her.”
The offering took many forms across the evening. A reimagined “Bye Bye Blackbird” — the 1926 Tin Pan Alley song that later became a jazz standard — arrived stripped of its familiar shape. At the mention of a hopeful, heralded bluebird, dissonant sounds dissolved into a nocturnal sweetness: gentle guitar, cool flute, freely billowing sax, and Bullock reaching up with earnest longing on a stage awash with blue. “Will my dreams now come true?” The music, aloft, held the possibility.
Seven poems by Rankine connected the tissue between each song. The intimate confessions, in Baker’s own voice, added layers of private grief: laments for lost love, yearning for validation, her thwarted attempts to bear children, and displacement from her homeland. “Others speak of escaping to America. / I can’t,” she says. “I rehearse a new landscape…under African skies.”
The next piece, “Sous le Ciel d’Afrique” (Under African Skies), described that broader landscape with expansive saxophone melody over flute and bassoon voices waving like palm fronds.The song itself is a French colonialist vision of Africa — imagined versus known. As Sellars says in a promotional video, the two-minute fantasy becomes a 15-minute meditation. “It’s no longer a travel poster,” he says, “but for all human beings who are Black and who’ve never been to Africa, an act of the imagination, and one of very deep emotion.”
Two festive numbers, “C’est ça le Vrai Bonheur” (That’s What True Happiness Is) and “Madiana,” arrived disguised as entertainment. Twirling across the stage, Bullock embodied the performer who loved performing — the Josephine Baker the world thought it knew. At the end, a crescendo built, compounding joy, then kept growing beyond and curdled, as the saxophone screamed past its own shape.
Nothing could have prepared the room for where the piece landed: the song “Si j’étais blanche,” which begins with the words, “I would like to be white.” It was an equal and opposite reaction to — one might say payment for — what came before. The lyrics read as a gutting, private anthem of self-erasure, but the real horror is that this was just one of many innocuous ditties in Baker’s catalog. Sorey turns the song inside out: stark piano rumbling in its lower register, then raking across its strings, the flute reduced to anxious, breathy, half-pitched flourishes.
A single staircase cleaved the stage, lit at the back by a single square of light like a Rothko — changing colors, but often burnished gold — with instruments fanned around it in a semicircle. The spareness underscored that the silhouette mattered because the body mattered, a character in its own right.
Even Bullock’s costume was deconstructed. At first glance, it was simple concert black, with faint echoes of Baker’s performance attire: some shimmer, drapey flow, a high slit. Those suggestions held for only so long. Well into the piece, Bullock tore off the cropped outer covering, leaving her torso bare but for a black sheer layer. Her chest stared back at the audience like eyes.
Given how integral physical exposure was to Baker’s act and image, and the rawness the opera had already evinced, this level of vulnerability felt inevitable, and now extended into movement.
In the sixth poem, Bullock as Baker confronts her characterization as a savage, and her own complicity: comparing herself to Princess Grace, she reasons that if she grins and plays the monkey and can then gain access to the power and fortune that Grace was simply given, then she’ll perform it.
Then Bullock evoked Baker’s signature dance in a “deconstructed Charleston” choreographed by Michael Schumacher — now rougher, as if forcing herself through it. Grunting and grimacing, she seemed to be watching herself perform it even as she performed it, satirizing the movement of her own body.
In “Terre Sèche” (Dry Earth), a mournful slave spiritual, Bullock lay prone on the stage, dead. The ensemble gathered around her in eulogy — the bassoonist first, a gentle presiding priestess. A wildly ecstatic violin solo, drawing on the doina, a Romanian folk dance, served as both conscience and emotional response. Cymbals crashed in, something Sellars said had never happened before in rehearsal or performance.
Then, in a sort of coda, Baker arose to deliver a final poem, beginning with, “Home? I have looked for it for a long time.” The quote came from her own speech at the 1963 March on Washington, delivered in her Free French uniform, the Légion d’honneur pinned among her decorations. She had been the only woman invited to speak alongside Martin Luther King Jr., and she recounted to America, the country she’d fled, how much hatred she had run from.
Perle Noire ends with “My Father, How Long?,” a spiritual printed in 1867, rising into full cacophony. Sellars said it should sound not like a lament but like an uprising, and the orchestra’s tumult delivered, turning expression to action. By then, though, the piece had already made its case, with this ending running past it.
It took considerable courage to present this work at the Palais Garnier — from the creators and performers to Paris Opera general director Alexander Neef, who saw the production at Dutch National Opera in 2023 and decided to bring it to Paris. Neef points to the avant-garde influence of Serge Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes on the Garnier’s history as reason enough to invite this charged a piece into so ornamental a box. As he told The New York Times, “It works really well when you put something onstage that creates a contrast or a friction, a tension.”
Elsewhere in the program, one of Rankine’s poems describes Baker as something to be consumed: “I understand that I am a package / That’s been ripped open and devoured / Like a box of chocolates.” And the sixth poem ends with a bare question: “What do you see?” in a register that could have come from James Baldwin, redirecting scrutiny from the watched to the watcher.
And it works because it is abstract. Rather than attempt to present definitive fact or representation, Sorey, Bullock, and their collaborators created a fluid, exploratory space and remained receptive as it evolved. In a moment when reckoning with race is as urgent as ever, it matters that American artists bring these conversations to so prominent a global stage, listening so intently to one another, and inviting audiences to do the same.
The show runs through Sept. 19
