Review: WOMADELAIDE 2019 - DAY 1 at Botanic Park

Reviewed by Ray Smith, Friday 8th March 2019.

The Global Village is once more a colourful, crowded hive of activity, as the stalls offering an extraordinary selection of handcrafted wares, ethical commerce ideas, community group connections, and more spring up from the grass of Botanic Park to welcome the first day of WOMADelaide 2019.

In a distant corner of the busy park the relative calm of the Healing Village can be found, offering the services of practitioners of massage, acupuncture, naturopathy, energetic healing, and Ngangkari (Traditional Aboriginal Healing).

The WOMADELAIDE festival is a complex and busy affair which spreads itself over a substantial area of the Botanic Park. There are seven performance stages laid out in such a way as to minimise audio interference or overlap between one and the other.

The Foundation Stage is an enormous construction in the form of a large sound shell and is flanked, some distance away, by two smaller but still substantial performance spaces listed as stages 2 and 3. The fourth stage is known as the Zoo Stage and is, not surprisingly, positioned close to the Adelaide Zoo end of the park, and the fifth is the Moreton Bay stage, which sits next to an impressive Moreton Bay fig tree on the Botanic Garden side of the park.

The other two stages are quite small spaces,d are positioned quite a distance from the others, and are referred to as the Novatech Stage and the Frome Park Pavilion. They are is also home to Speakers Corner and the Taste the World tent

The distance between the main five performance spaces and the two smaller ones gives the impression of two separate festivals and, to an extent, that is the case. The larger stages are there to cater for ensembles and better-known acts that will attract a larger audience, the smaller cater very well for solo performers or small ensembles and for viewable discussions and interviews.

The Kaurna welcome to country was conducted by Jamie Goldsmith and Taikurtinna on the Foundation Stage. This WOMADelaide tradition reminds us all of the history of the area as Kaurna country and that we are walking on the homelands of the oldest people of the oldest living culture on Earth.

The welcome used to be conducted by Jamie's father, the well-respected artist, educator, storyteller and advocate for reconciliation, Stephen Gadlabarti Goldsmith, a Kaurna, Narungga, and Ngarrindjeri man from South Australia. Uncle Stevie's Classroom, named in his honour, will host three workshops, run by Jamie Goldsmith and Taikurtinna, in KidZone on Monday 11 March.

The huge centre stage was filled to capacity as the Sarod trio, of Amjad Ali Khan and his two sons, were joined by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra to present the stunning and acclaimed concerto for Sarod, Samaagam.
Amjad Ali Khan is one of the undisputed masters of the music world and he and his sons represent the sixth and seventh generations in the legendary line of the Senia Bangash School.

The violins of the orchestra droned softly as the three Sarod maestros took turns taking short, brittle solos as the tabla measured time. It felt like a journey through a desert as the bright attack of the Sarod cut through the shifting landscape drawn by the orchestra, as the insistent tabla marked our journey's steps.

The concerto is quite a restrained piece but soon gave way to brighter colours as the orchestra lifted and fell like waves or the fluttering of flags in the wind, the conductor carefully watching the trio of Sarod players as they improvised freely amongst the themes offered by reed and horn, string and bow.

East and West came together in a wonderful celebration of the endless variety of music across the world, and WOMADelaide was born again as the late afternoon sky began to redden behind the mighty shell of the Foundation Stage.

Stage Three, run by the ageless and irrepressible Master of Sound, Dave Usher, was host to the South African ensemble BCUC (Bantu Continua Uhuru Consciousness) and their heady, rhythmic, pulsing sound. High energy dance music with no melodic or harmonic instrument other than a bass guitar, the performance relied upon multi-layered vocals and complex percussion. The ritualistic songs are in Zulu, Sotho and English and speak of a brighter Africa, a richer Africa, a country standing proud in its traditions and beliefs.

The power of the songs taps into the spirit and the ancestors of the band's rebellious and outspoken hometown of Soweto, a town that has had to reinvent itself after the horrors and injustices of apartheid, and BCUC push the rebirth and a positive vision for the future through songs drawn from a repertoire as wide as the country itself.

As the sun was setting, the Foundation Stage was taken over by Fatoumata Diawara, the extraordinary singer and electric guitarist from Mali. She was joined on stage by another guitarist, a keyboard player and a drummer playing a full kit. The performance began with the haunting sound of Diawara's unaccompanied voice floating over the gathering crowd.

There is a quality to her singing that is very hard to define. At one moment it is angelic and soft as a breeze against a cheek, but it can quickly harden into a resolute and unforgiving call for justice and freedom.

She is a flamboyant performer on stage, and dances wildly between verses of songs, returning to her central microphone to howl in outrage at the injustices that she has long fought against, her angry voice mirrored by slashing, stabbing riffs and extended solos from her electric guitar.

As the sun slid quietly behind the stage at the end of her performance I was reminded, by a scent on the wind, that there is yet another 'village' within the expansive confines of Botanic Park this weekend, a village made up of stall, upon stall, upon stall offering superb food from all over the world, and the promise of the delights on offer led me there.