Julia Bullock sings Tyshawn Sorey on Joséphine Baker at the Barbican on Tuesday 20 October 2026, staged by Peter Sellars with spoken interludes by Claudia Rankine.
Joséphine Baker left segregated St Louis, arrived in Paris in 1925 and became the most photographed woman in Europe, dancing in a costume of bananas that she understood perfectly well as a joke at the audience’s expense. She took French citizenship in 1937, worked for the Red Cross and the Resistance through the occupation and served with the Free French, which won her the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honour with the rosette of the Resistance. She refused to perform to segregated houses at home. In 2021 she became the first Black woman interred in the Panthéon.
Julia Bullock, who was also born in St Louis, sings her. Bullock is the American soprano who has done more than anyone of her generation to change what a recital programme can contain, and she took a Grammy for her first solo album. The music is by Tyshawn Sorey, a composer and drummer who won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize and was made a MacArthur fellow at thirty-seven; Peter Sellars directs; the spoken interludes are by the poet Claudia Rankine.
It is given once, in the Barbican Hall on Tuesday 20 October 2026 at half past seven, and it moves between opera, jazz, spirituals and the elegance and raunch of the early French music hall. Programmed in the classical season, which is the correct filing and the least obvious one.