It’s a shame Robert Graves wasn’t around to see Anohni at Disney Hall last week. The author of “White Goddess” would have recognized the Deer Woman sanctifying the stage before the show began and after it was over. He would have applauded Anohni’s painstakingly stylized performance. He would have cheered on her denunciation of patriarchy as the source of all our environmental, political and personal problems.
Anohni was strange, but the strangeness is 100% authentic. It is not a gimmick, not a mode that she puts on then takes off. Nothing was for effect, though everything was done for maximum dramatic impact. The “show” is Anohni being herself: in succession defiant, frightened, angry, thoughtful, intimate, and philosophical. It was weird and exciting.
It began with her singing “Why Am I Alive Now?” so intensely, I thought to myself, “Oh no, she’s not going to make it through the rest of the evening!!” Not to worry: if anything, her voice got firmer and stronger as the evening went on.
Her previous appearance at Disney Hall is one of my personal top ten rock concert experiences – though I’m not positive a rock concert is what it was.
This time she and her ensemble slipped between soundscapes with impressive nonchalance. She composes, delicately mercurial music.
There was some avant-garde cabaret (the tremendous “Man Is the Baby”).
There was chamber music (the Erik Satie-y “Manta Ray”).
The music for “Can’t” could be by Van Morrison - earnest, heartfelt, upbeat – but the words are resolutely downbeat.
She prefaced “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” with reminiscence of going to see Jimmy Scott in the early 80s “when there would be three people in the audience”. Very interesting to know that she’s a JS fan, but her version wasn’t like Jimmy Scott or like anybody else in the world who has ever sung this song. She can’t do this song or anything else straight. She rescued it from being a famous standard by restoring the heartbreak and drama. She didn’t conclude the song so much as cut it off: the band stopped, the lights went out – total darkness. Yikes!
There were also other speeches to the audience. It was illuminating to know she had been a study of Vito Russo.
She ended with an encore of “Hope There's Someone”, accompanying herself no piano, but building to a glorious cacophony.
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