Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine review – turgid tribute to pioneering star

Barbican Hall, London Julia Bullock is magnetic in this discourse on Josephine Baker, but the 100-minute piece is slow-moving and lacking in intimacy Josephine Baker was many things: a civil rights activist; a spy for the French resistance; a woman who, born into poverty, became the best-paid stage star in Europe. But before she was any of these, she was an entertainer. So one wonders what on earth she would make of Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine, a turgid 100-minute piece developed by the soprano Julia Bullock, composer Tyshawn Sorey, poet Claudia Rankine and director Peter Sellars.

This was its UK premiere, although Bullock and Sorey have been performing versions of it in the US and elsewhere over the past decade. It isn’t a tribute in the usual sense, but a discourse on racial discrimination, in Baker’s day and our own. Bullock, magnetic as ever, sings and speaks alongside six musicians, who include Sorey himself on piano, drum kit and percussion, plus electric guitar, violin, alto flute, saxophone and bassoon. On a platform, in front of a saturated square of brightly coloured light, Bullock declaims Rankine’s words and sings Sorey’s music, in which Baker’s songs are…