Julia Bullock sings Tyshawn Sorey’s setting of Joséphine Baker’s life at the Barbican, staged by Peter Sellars with interludes by the poet Claudia Rankine.
Julia Bullock, the American soprano who won a Grammy for her first solo album, sings the life of Joséphine Baker at the Barbican Centre on Tuesday 20 October 2026. Peter Sellars directs the single performance.
Baker left segregated St Louis, arrived in Paris in 1925 and became the most photographed woman in Europe. She danced in a costume of bananas that she understood as a joke at the audience’s expense.
She took French citizenship in 1937 and worked for the Red Cross and the Resistance through the occupation. Serving with the Free French, she earned the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honour, and she refused to perform to segregated houses at home. In 2021 she became the first Black woman interred in the Panthéon.
Bullock, also born in St Louis, mixes opera, art song and new commissions inside one recital. The work is given once, in the Barbican Hall, and moves between opera, jazz, spirituals and the early French music hall.
The music is by Tyshawn Sorey, a composer and drummer who won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize and was made a MacArthur fellow at 37. The poet Claudia Rankine wrote the spoken interludes.