Adelaide’s danger zone: Perle Noire

Adelaide Festival, His Majesty’s Theatre, 1/3/2026

Peter Sellars, Tyshawn Sorey, Julia Bullock

’Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine’ doesn’t so much “portray” Joséphine Baker as put her on trial—along with us. This is not a biography in scenes, not a greatest-hits cabaret, not a museum label set to music. It is a long, single meditation that circles the paradox at the centre of Baker’s fame: a Black woman who became one of the most celebrated performers on earth, in a world that often loved her most when it could reduce her to an image—exotic, erotic, consumable, safe. The work’s force is that it won’t let that paradox stay historical. It makes it present tense.

At Her Majesty’s, the stage picture is spare enough to make you think: a staircase and raised platform, the musicians split on either side like two worlds, Composer Tyshawn Sorey stationed among piano and percussion. The simplicity removes the usual hiding places. You can’t float away on spectacle. You have to stay with a body in light and shadow; you have to hear how songs are dismantled and rebuilt; you have to register how quickly glamour tips into exposure.

The opening move tells you everything. ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’ arrives in a state of deliberate ruin—deconstructed until it is more atmosphere than standard. The tune is not offered as recognition; it is offered as a fractured memory. Soprano Julia Bullock repeats a word- Blackbird, the ensemble colours it, Sorey’s piano runs like thought under pressure, and only late in the piece does the familiar “Bye Bye” surface—cryptic, withheld, almost suspicious. It’s a brilliant inversion of the normal contract: you don’t get the comfort of the song; you get the unease beneath it. The work announces itself immediately as the opposite of entertainment. It is focus.

Poet Claudia Rankine’s interludes don’t stitch the piece together; they cut through it. They refuse the comfortable arc of triumph. They make Baker’s inner voice audible in the gap between what she performed and what she could never safely say. And Julia Bullock’s singing—disciplined, constantly shaded—doesn’t seduce the hall into easy admiration so much as hold the room in moral tension: tone as witness, phrasing as insistence, beauty repeatedly edged with accusation. She can narrow the voice to something almost spoken, then open it into a clear, ringing line that carries the hall without effort, and at key moments she sustains notes just long enough for them to stop being merely beautiful and become confrontational.

Sorey’s music behaves the same way. It won’t settle into genre comfort. It moves through cabaret, gospel heat, chorale-like stillness, fractured jazz, always refusing to let “entertainment” take over. Even the moments of lift feel wired with awareness: beauty isn’t offered as escape, only as a way to carry truth further into the room.

And then the ending lands like a judgement. The final spiritual—“My Father, How Long”—arrives as a question from the 19th century that refuses to stay there. It is a prayer for rescue and a protest against endurance: how long will our people suffer? when will there be happiness on Earth? In Adelaide, in 2026, it doesn’t feel like repertoire. It feels like a live wire. The room reacts before the clapping can organise itself: a held breath, a pause, the sense that people are checking what has shifted inside them.

There wasn’t a cathartic standing ovation that let everyone discharge the pressure into applause and go home feeling virtuous. Instead, there was something different and deeper: an audience thinking. Applause came, but it wasn’t the point. The point was the quiet that preceded it—the collective moment of retention rather than release. A standing ovation can be a reflex; this felt like people carrying the work out with them, letting the questions firm as they walked into the night.

And those questions don’t stay inside the theatre. They follow you into the foyer and onto the street: who gets to speak, and on what terms? who is welcomed only if they perform a manageable version of themselves? what does a city do with art that refuses to soothe?

That is why ‘Perle Noire’ matters so intensely in Adelaide in 2026: it isn’t arriving in a neutral civic atmosphere. It lands in a city already living its own argument about voice, power, and the shrinking public square.

On 2 January 2026, Premier Peter Malinauskas wrote to the Adelaide Festival board opposing the inclusion of Palestinian-Australian writer Randa Abdel-Fattah in Writers’ Week, warning the festival risked “legitimate public ridicule” if her appearance wasn’t cancelled. The chain of events that followed—boycotts, resignations, cancellation—was historic: a Writers’ Week that began in 1960 did not go ahead. It is hard to watch that unfold and then sit in Perle Noire without feeling the rhyme.

Because the work is, among other things, about the conditions under which voices are allowed to appear in public. About who is welcomed only as a “package” for consumption. About how institutions and audiences alike use comfort as a filter. And about how “cohesion” can become a polite synonym for compliance.

This is where Peter Sellars’ return becomes more than a return. Nearly a quarter century after his cut-short tenure, he is back in Adelaide—“as an old friend,” he says—bringing work that insists art is not ideology but experience, not lecture but encounter. He moved the Festival toward a more democratic and Indigenous-inclusive civic project; he was also, in those years, a visible presence in the city—talking to everyone, not just the cultural class, as if the festival belonged in the street as much as in the theatre.

That is why the memory of 1970s Premier Don Dunstan also returns. Sellars’ civic style—porous, public, attentive to the “us” and the “them,” willing to centre the difficult—feels like an echo of a Dunstan-shaped Adelaide: an Adelaide that believed culture could enlarge the public realm rather than manage it. In the current Malinauskas moment, with its heavy undertone of message control and reputational fear, that older civic imagination feels almost like a provocation.

So the absence of a standing ovation becomes part of the meaning. It suggests Adelaide didn’t treat ‘Perle Noire’ as a triumph to applaud and forget. It treated it as an unsettling gift: something to carry, argue about, test against the city’s own contradictions.

Applause is easy. Thinking is harder. The best thing that happened in that theatre may have been precisely that: an audience leaving not uplifted, but sharpened—walking home with Bye Bye Blackbird still in fragments in the mind, and that final spiritual still asking, in the dark: how long?