NINA

Year : 2023

Service : Music Theater and Lighting design

Performer: Claron McFadden | Concept, direction, and lighting: Luigi De Angelis | Dramaturgy and costumes: Chiara Lagani | Musical creation: Claron McFadden and Damiano Meacci (Tempo Reale) | Electronic music and sound design: Damiano Meacci | Photography: Enrico Fedrigoli | Coaching: Andrea Argentieri | Percussions: Adama Gueye | Promotion and management: Marco Molduzzi | Organization: Maria Donnoli, Marco Molduzzi|Communication: Maria Donnoli | Production: E Production/Fanny & Alexander, Muziektheater Transparant | Co-production: IRCAM / Centre Pompidou (Paris), Festival d’Automne à Paris, Romaeuropa Festival

NINA is a tribute to the life of Eunice Kathleen Waymon, singer, pianist, writer, and civil rights activist, better known to most as Nina Simone. The award-winning American soprano and performer Claron McFadden, using audio documents from radio and television interviews and public speeches, creates a complete mimetic portrait of the artist Nina Simone. Through the technique of heterodirection, a key element of Fanny & Alexander’s poetics, Claron McFadden inhabits her voice, showcasing the various manifestations of the strength of her character and creative spirit, exploring the most significant moments of her life, from poetic tension to the struggle for women’s and African American rights, revealing her deepest vulnerabilities and wounds.

• November 4-5, 2023 – Romaeuropa Festival, Mattatoio, Rome (DEBUT)
• December 1-2, 2023 – De Singel, Antwerp (BE)
• December 13-16, 2023 – Festival d’Automne à Paris, IRCAM, Paris (FR)
• May 18-19, 2024 – Festival Presente Indicativo | Milano Porta Europa, Piccolo Teatro, Milan (IT)
• May 20-21, 2024 – O. Festival, TR25 Schouwburg, Rotterdam (NL)
• June 11, 2024 – Ravenna Festival, Teatro Alighieri, Ravenna (IT)
• June 21, 2024 – Festival D’Aix-en-Provence, Pavillon Noir, Aix-en-Provence (FR)
• September 29, 2024 – Fabbrica Europa Festival, Teatro Puccini, Florence (IT)
• November 27, 2024 – Bari (IT)
• December 1, 2024 – Cultur Centrum Brugge, Bruges (BE)
• December 4, 2024 – Toplocentrala Regional Center for Contemporary Art, Sofia (BG)
• December 10-21, 2024 – Théâtre 14, Paris (FR)

[ph. Enrico Fedrigoli]

PRESS REVIEWS

• Laura Zangarini, La Lettura – Corriere della Sera
• Emiliano Metalli, Banquo Magazine
• Sergio Lo Gatto, Teatro e Critica
• Peter Vantyghem, De Standaard
• Giulia Starchi, Itinerari nel Presente Indicativo
• Cristina Tirinzoni, LuceWeb
• Anna Passatore, Fermata Spettacolo
• Philippe Mangeot

“A Voice to Give Voice to Black People,” by Laura Zangarini | La Lettura – Corriere della Sera, October 22, 2023

Germaine Greer, Australian writer and journalist, one of the most important voices of the feminist movement, argued that “every generation must discover Nina Simone. She is proof that female genius truly exists.” The singer of Mississippi Goddam, a watershed moment in the history of Black music, is at the heart of Nina, the new production by Fanny & Alexander, a theater company founded in 1992 by Chiara Lagani and Luigi De Angelis, premiering at the Romaeuropa Festival (November 4-5, Mattatoio).

Performed by the American soprano and performer Claron McFadden, Nina is a tribute to Eunice Kathleen Waymon (February 21, 1933 – April 21, 2003), singer, pianist, writer, and American civil rights activist, one of the most indomitable talents in 20th-century music. From a young age, Nina aspired to be “the first Black classical pianist.” She sang with her sister in the church choir where her mother was a preacher, and she was so gifted that the community pooled together a scholarship to send her to New York to study at Juilliard, one of the world’s most prestigious schools for arts, music, and theater, while awaiting admission to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where she was confident they would accept her because of her talent. Nina gave an excellent audition but was rejected, as she later recounted, because she was “Black” (two days before her death, Curtis would award her an honorary degree).

“We’re talking about a figure who, in addition to the musical aspect, uses words through singing and interviews to support a political discourse as well,” explains De Angelis, the creator and director of the project. “At the age of eleven, in the South of America during the Jim Crow era of the 1940s, Nina encounters racial prejudice. Until then, she had lived ‘protected.’ But during her first piano recital at the town hall in Tyron, North Carolina, her parents, dressed up for the evening, are moved from the front row to the back of the hall to accommodate a white couple. Nina refuses to play until they are moved back to their original seats. This episode will shape her life. In the 1960s, when the civil rights movement for Black Americans engaged her, it would bring out her indignation and energy, and her unwavering stance in favor of freedom and justice for all. Attributes that would establish her as a pioneer and inspirational leader of the movement.”

Nina decides to pursue a political discourse through her songs: Mississippi Goddam becomes an anthem for civil rights, the most crystal-clear example. Written in less than an hour, it is a furious and lucid response to the 1963 murder of African American civil rights activist Medgar Evers in Mississippi, and to the racist bombing that killed four Black girls the same year at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. “It is especially this period that the performance captures,” explains De Angelis. “I thought of Claron McFadden as the interpreter because to find her voice as a woman, a Black singer, she had to move from the United States to Europe, to the Netherlands. She is an exceptional performer, able to go from Monteverdi to Rameau, to the boldest experimentalism. I find that Nina and Claron share some similarities, especially the ability to open the heart channel during singing. Claron, like Nina, is not afraid to convey emotions through song: even though she possesses incredible technique, she is able to move, to touch people on the inside.”

Thanks to the technique of heterodirection and starting from audio documents, radio and television interviews, and public speeches, McFadden composes a full portrait of Nina Simone, allowing for a deep and intimate connection with the artist’s inner world, inhabiting her voice, and witnessing the complex manifestations of the strength of her character and creative spirit. “Even today, listening to her with your eyes closed, you can understand from her voice how deeply this woman was wounded,” reflects De Angelis. “A wound that she makes speak, express, through that marvelous expressive medium which is song.”

“Nina Simone,” adds McFadden, “transmitted her view of the world in which she lived through music, first as a classical pianist and later as a performer. Her multifaceted legacy is open to many interpretations. For me, the fact that she channeled her genius into a form that was not her original intention is something that should never be forgotten.” For the American soprano, it is difficult to have an opinion on the singer and civil rights activist for Black Americans “that isn’t drenched in myth and urban legend. I didn’t grow up with her music,” she clarifies. “I’d heard about her. But by then, she was already a ‘fighter for freedom’ in music, and maybe she wasn’t getting airtime on the radio because of her ‘militant’ view of the United States. I really discovered Nina Simone when I moved to Europe, where she had a revival with My Baby Just Cares For Me, which was actually the only song of hers I knew from my youth. Now I’m rediscovering her through this project, a dramaturgy that intersects pieces from Nina Simone’s autobiography, I Put My Spell On You. But it’s not a biopic, and I won’t ‘act’ as Nina Simone. I’ll be present; the voice that speaks and sings will be mine. But I see myself more as a ‘container’ through which Nina will share her words and her art, which are still urgent and relevant today.” This sharing also encompasses the wounds of racial discrimination. “I see the United States as a tapestry woven with the thread of inequality, injustice,” says McFadden. “Only completely unravelling it would resolve racism. But unfortunately, that’s impossible. So I have to remind myself that the U.S. is a country built by people coming from many other places.”

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“Stunning Nina!” by Emiliano Metalli | Banquo Magazine, November 7, 2023

It is not a given to be able to clearly and magnetically condense the artistic and biographical experience of an icon. The challenge, moreover, of confronting a giant like Nina Simone, is perhaps an even greater risk. That is why it was a privilege to attend the performances during REF 2023 of this extraordinary tribute to one of the most complete musicians of the 20th century. Not by chance, the audience that filled the hall—festivalgoers, defined by their aesthetic tastes and multilingualism—followed every moment without distraction: no inappropriate phone calls, no bluish lights shining on the faces of bored regulars, no late-night alarms reminding them of commitments they would rather forget. These festivalgoers, diverse and a little eccentric, are certainly attentive and dedicated—rare qualities these days.

Essential for appreciating a performance that is both emotional and complex. Because Nina Simone was both complex and emotional. Her expressive richness and complexity shine in the overlap of different layers (understood as juxtaposed and interpenetrating surfaces), making her as precious and multifaceted as a diamond: music and politics, thought and action, identity and freedom, gender and race. These are just some of the layers that intersect in her life and art, as brilliantly suggested by this performance.

A concrete and often uncomfortable artist: the search for justice weighed heavily on her career and songs, sometimes ignored by some radio stations, especially during the most heated period of racial and feminist activism. Just remember Mississippi Goddam, written in response to the murder of four girls in a racially motivated bombing and first performed in 1964, or the unforgettable rendition of Pirate Jenny, a piece from Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, where the call for reprisal as a means of fighting racism is evident.

But her exemplary willpower cannot be erased from memory, nor the sense of justice that, at the age of twelve, allowed her to force (white) concert organizers to seat her parents in the front row, defying the racial laws that prevented Black people from occupying privileged seats in a hall designated for whites. The dream of becoming a classical concert pianist fades, but from the ashes of this phoenix arises a comet in the world of music.

Claron McFadden, Luigi De Angelis, Chiara Lagani, and Damiano Meacci take this fiery material and shape it, each in their own role, freely, without preconceptions and without constraints, to tell through evocative impressions a portion of this unreachable woman’s life. Words (captured from speeches and interviews and mixed together), songs (selected from a vast repertoire and presented in a new and original form, distorted, distilled, synthesized, or expanded), sounds (real and unreal, present and distant), lights (warm, cold, detached or enveloping), and movements (broken, violent, idealized) all contribute to embodying the fierce soul of Nina, at times terrifying in the abyss that seems to open up from her eyes, gestures, and pauses. A performance that transports the viewer elsewhere, shakes them up, gives them both a smile and a tear, and then leaves them, exhausted, in a reality that still has many limitations and barriers to fight against, as Nina teaches us. A spell that comes to life thanks to the talent and technical control at the service of the protagonist’s expressiveness: Claron McFadden, stunning.

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NINA (Fanny & Alexander)” by Sergio Lo Gatto | Teatro e Critica, November 18, 2023

The mimetic portraits of Fanny & Alexander is a project that gained visibility thanks to the great success of Se questo è Levi, winner of two Ubu Awards and still widely distributed since 2018. However, the baptism of this approach can be traced back to the quirky To Be or Not To Be Roger Bernat, where a lecture on Hamlet served as the pretext for a disturbing descent into the biography and physiognomy of the avatar of a real, distant yet present person. There was also Manson, where the audience interrogates, post-mortem, the supercriminal, who answers by following the track of numerous interviews he gave during his lifetime. But further back, there’s all the refined work on heterodirection, now an indispensable methodology in the work of Luigi De Angelis and Chiara Lagani, which sends original vocal tracks into the ears of the performers, experimenting with a radically different path, halfway between mimesis, possession, and an existential puppet theater à la Kantor. One cannot disregard this small, still evolving history if they wish to understand what happens in Nina, which had its world premiere at REf 23, where the wonderful Claron McFadden (also performing in The Garden) embodies the persona, movements, and voice of Miss Nina Simone, prophet of the American protest song and priestess of the African American class struggle.

In an “impossible concert” blending English and Italian, spoken and sung, Nina addresses the audience from a sort of afterlife. The “musical creation” is by Damiano Meacci, who, with surprising spatialization, creates an elliptical soundscape: the rhythm section is almost excluded, and the voice chases a cluster of frequencies that rise and fall in volume, performing, directed by headphones, a true necromantic experiment. Is it possible to bring back characters who are no longer with us? Yes, if those characters have left enough traces of their passage on Earth. And if Fanny & Alexander sees in them a potential legacy of the history of all of us.

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“Nina Simone is reborn at deSingel” by Peter Vantyghem | De Standaard, November 30, 2023

“What would Nina Simone tell us today?” To answer this question, Luigi De Angelis could have made a film or created a hologram, but the director chose instead to use mimesis. Just as great battles are sometimes reconstructed, he wanted someone to reincarnate Nina Simone on stage. Next Friday and Saturday at deSingel in Antwerp, Claron McFadden, a well-known operatic soprano, will embody the soul and spirit of Nina Simone. In her headphones, she will hear Nina Simone’s original voice, singing alongside her on the lines “you slavers will know / what it’s like to be a slave.” “It’s like I’m performing her own words,” says McFadden. Additionally, during the performance, McFadden will present fragments of interviews, revealing Nina Simone’s worldview while the audience is immersed in the sounds and spirit of her songs. Similarly, the prayer “West Wind,” written by Miriam Makeba, is accompanied by African percussion. “We want people to see not Claron, but Nina Simone,” says De Angelis.

A Second Skin

The technique of heterodirection has a clear advantage, De Angelis emphasizes: “The performer no longer has to worry about memory. Claron can focus all her energy on identification, it’s like wearing a second skin.” But it’s not so simple: a strong connection with the person being embodied is essential. McFadden will perform songs like “Four Women,” “Mississippi Goddam,” and “Dam-bala,” in which Nina Simone denounced the racism she faced. The singer had wanted to study classical music but was not admitted to the Philadelphia Conservatory—a trauma McFadden, studying in New York, managed to avoid. “I come from that same tradition,” says McFadden, “my ancestors were slaves, I was born during apartheid. But I managed to escape to Europe, where I could live and work free from racism. This project brings me face to face with my roots: I recognize how my life could have been, and I see in Nina the tragedy of the United States. She wanted to sing more love songs, but she became the face of the civil rights struggle. The fact that this affects me so deeply means I haven’t completely escaped my past.”

Séance (Spiritual Session)

How to artistically interpret this approach? We know covers, improvisation, but this is different. “Claron allows Nina Simone to truly enter, not on a cognitive level, but into the most remote part of her brain,” says De Angelis. He describes it as a “communication channel.” McFadden cautiously refers to it as a “séance”: a private meeting where spirits are communicated with. “The theater is a great place to enter a trance,” says De Angelis, who finds similarities with Dionysian rituals in Greek theater and Voodoo rituals in Haitian culture. “In today’s language: Claron McFadden opens, even before the audience sits down, a channel in her heart to feel the tragedy in Nina Simone’s life and songs.” McFadden adds: “I use her words, her timing, and her intonation. I studied her interpretation of these songs well, and with the headphones, she is with me. I don’t imitate her, I have my own vocal color, but her energy passes through me. I feel like a ‘vessel,’ and I want this vessel to be free from anything that could contaminate what it carries with it, like a too-large ego, judgment, or technical prowess. I mostly want to be humble so I can become one with her.”

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“Nina” by Giulia Storchi | Itinerari nel Presente Indicativo, May 19, 2024

Can theater bring a public figure or a historical event back to life?After “Se questo è Levi” and the more recent “Manson,” the company Fanny&Alexander continues to explore the potential and paradoxes of actor-based research. This time, the starting point is Nina Simone’s 1976 concert in Montreux. The audience thus witnesses a carefully orchestrated combination of musical pieces and autobiographical snapshots of Eunice Kathleen Waymon, who would later adopt the stage name Nina Simone.On stage, soprano Claron McFadden embodies the African-American singer through the device of heterodirection, a hallmark of Fanny&Alexander: listening to Nina’s voice in her headphones, McFadden recreates the hesitations and stammers of speech, positioned somewhere between mimetic reproduction and surrender to a perceptual trance.The red and blue beams of light that traverse the stage space—the light design, like the direction, is by Luigi De Angelis—follow the artist’s movements, illuminating not only the act of performance itself but also marking the stages of a journey toward progressive political awareness. As Nina shares her autobiography, she retraces the steps that led her to become a militant artist: from the impossibility of pursuing her dream career as a classical pianist to concerts dedicated to the entire African-American community, her beloved “lost race.” While the piano keys seem to have a life of their own, Nina tenderly dedicates the verses of “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” to her chosen audience.Thus, music becomes a space in which to exercise active militancy for civil rights for Black people and feminist struggle, championed by friendships with American playwright Lorraine Hansberry and South African singer Miriam Makeba. On the stage at Grassi, Damiano Meacci’s musical arrangement reconstructs the rhythmic symphony of percussion accompanying the words of “Westwind”: the soprano abandons herself to a liberating dance on the frenetic rhythm of the drums, which build up dizzyingly between the words of the hopeful cry “unify us, don’t divide us.”The dramaturgy, by Chiara Lagani, introduces a shift: Claron overlays her own experience with Eunice’s biographical journey, highlighting how retracing the steps of this Black icon presents a powerful challenge today. “I have to live with Nina, and this is very difficult,” she confides. Forced by necessity to emigrate to Europe to begin her opera singing career, McFadden denounces the decline of an era of protest that was unable to extinguish the racial paradigm, still vibrant in an America emerging from apartheid. A cry that cannot be silenced in the silence, a battle that knows no rest: “Nina” offers the audience the echo of words of struggle, attempting to point the way toward pure freedom, free from fear.

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Extraordinary “Nina.” The Musical Theater Show Dedicated to Nina Simone by Cristina Tirinzoni | Luceweb, May 28, 2024

A figure dressed in black. A black piano outlined by red neon lights. The smoky atmosphere created by the soft lights magically transports the audience into one of those New York clubs from the 1960s where she performed after leaving the Baptist churches of North Carolina, where, from a young age, she sang and played the piano with excellence. “What is freedom to me? Freedom is not being afraid. That’s it. Not being afraid.” The magic of theater. Even today, the unique and inimitable voice of Nina Simone vibrates on stage. An unmatched artist. Rebel. Woman. Black. A symbol and voice of the African-American civil rights struggle during the darkest years of racial segregation. Yes, it happened. The jazz and soul legend appeared at the Piccolo Teatro Grassi in Milan (as part of the Presente Indicativo Festival), starring in the new musical theater show Nina, created by the Ravenna-based company Fanny & Alexander, directed by Luigi De Angelis, who also designed the captivating lighting, with dramaturgy and costumes by Chiara Lagani, electronic music and sound design by Damiano Meacci, which will be performed on June 11 at the Ravenna Festival.

It wasn’t obvious to condense the artistic and biographical experience of a legend like Nina Simone, the stage name chosen by Eunice Kathleen Waymon (1933–2003) in homage to the French actress Simone Signoret. De Angelis’ direction tells her story through words (drawn from public speeches and interviews, and mixed together), songs (selected from her vast repertoire and presented in new, original forms—distorted, simplified, synthesized, or expanded), sounds (real and unreal, present and distant), lights (warm, cold, detached or enveloping), and movements (broken, violent, sinuous), all of which give form to Nina’s fierce soul and reveal her vulnerabilities. The role is played by the award-winning American soprano and performer Claron McFadden. In a way that goes beyond mimetic representation, McFadden’s performance is almost a possession. At the crossroads of technology and magic. Using the technique of heterodirection, Claron McFadden connects in real-time with the artist’s voice through headphones, creating an effect of “fantastic overlay” for an “impossible concert” in English and Italian, spoken and sung, alternating legendary songs with evocations of political stances.

Nina tells her story from deep within. She was born in 1933 in Tryon, North Carolina, where the railway tracks divided the town into two parts: one for whites and the other for blacks. Sixth of eight siblings, with skin of shiny ebony, both of her parents were Methodist preachers. Eunice discovered racial discrimination at a relatively early age. A particular event marked her deeply: when her parents, who had come to watch her first piano performance at the town hall in Tryon, were asked to leave the front row reserved for whites and move to the back. She pushed the stool aside, stood up, and refused to play. Silence filled the room. Her embarrassed parents returned to their seats. Eunice sat back at the piano, and before playing the Bach piece scheduled for the program, she noticed some white audience members laughing at her. She later compared the anger from that day to being “skinned alive,” but said she emerged with skin “a bit stronger. A bit blacker.”

Claron McFadden is a stunning Nina. Angry at the whole world. Slow and sensual in her feline movements when singing West Wind, written by Miriam Makeba, accompanied by African percussion. Even the pauses, her silences, send chills, like sharp and rustling brushes. From Color Is A Beautiful Thing to the famous Mississippi Goddam, the set list crescendos in provoking emotions in the listener. Anyone who knows even a little of Nina Simone’s story knows that her voice contains all the stories, conflicts, and tenderness: her anger, sadness, melancholy, despair, her pain of living, her supreme rage at the world, racial discrimination, her tumultuous relationship with her violent manager-husband, and the equally dramatic one with her daughter, Lisa Celeste. The overwhelming success, the years marred by strong manic-depressive crises.

Nina is not “just” a show, not a performance; it’s part memoir, part stream of consciousness, but above all, it’s a tribute to a voice that cannot be imitated. Deep, intense, angry. A voice full of sadness and joy. Of light and sharp edges. Capable of breaking music with a myriad of cuts, wounds, and lacerations (“Sometimes my voice sounds like gravel, other times like a coffee with cream,” she said). How can a human voice contain something so extraordinary?

She died on April 21, 2003, at her home in Carry-le-Rouet, near Marseille, at the age of 70, two days after receiving the title of doctor honoris causa in music and humanities from the Curtis Institute, the same school that had once rejected her scholarship because she was Black. A gesture that does not erase the indelible stain of 1950. For those who do not know her, they should listen. A long series of albums and live concert footage bears witness to the profound, inescapable beauty of her art. Just listening to Sinnerman is enough to understand the flame of genius in the soul priestess, in all its power.

We had the opportunity to meet director Luigi De Angelis, who also created the lighting, and to discuss with him the dramaturgy of light.

The black piano stands like a totem amid the shadows of the stage, outlined by a string of red LED lights.Nina played the piano excellently. Since childhood, her greatest desire had been to become the first great Black classical pianist in America, with the respect and admiration of everyone, both Black and white. She began playing at three years old, receiving her first lessons from Muriel Massinovitch, a refined Englishwoman married to a Russian painter, at whose house her mother worked as a cleaner. Those Saturday hours at Mrs. Massinovitch’s house were pure joy. Little Eunice studied Bach, Debussy, Beethoven, Chopin, Rachmaninov, and Liszt. The piano would often be the only instrument accompanying her voice. It was the instrument that, since childhood, had protected young and frightened Eunice from a harsh reality of discrimination and racism. A protective cage. A playmate. “I live between a world of Blacks and a world of whites, between the black and white keys of my piano, but when I sat at the piano, it was always a triumph.”

How did you construct the dramaturgy of the light?On two levels. Light is both material and immaterial, physical and metaphysical. The first level of lighting evokes the atmosphere of a 60s/70s club, while the second sought a light that would present Nina Simone as an epiphanic apparition, a ghostly presence with light oblique angles to produce a soft shadow. A presence that becomes a dreamlike vision. I wanted to use cutting lights that did not touch the floor, as if they had the power to make Nina’s body levitate into a psychic dimension. Almost a process of levitation. The myth returns to shine, torn from oblivion. And it still speaks to us.

When Nina/McFadden sings Mississippi Goddam, there is a change in the lighting.The discourse becomes political, and the color red explodes. Red expresses all the anger Nina wants to shout out for the injustices suffered by African Americans in a violent and unjust world. She who had committed herself deeply to the civil rights struggle. “Singing for my people became my purpose. I no longer played jazz or blues or classical music: I played civil rights.” And when all the anger inside her transformed into music, the result always left listeners speechless.

Mississippi Goddam (1963) is “a point of no return.” Can you explain why, in more detail?“You don’t have to live next to me, just give me my equality,” she says in the song: “I don’t ask you to live next to me, just give me my equality.” Mississippi Goddam was written in a rush in 1963, after she learned of the racially motivated bombing by the Ku Klux Klan at a Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama, where four young girls were killed. Simone called it her first “civil rights song”: the deaths of those four girls on September 15, 1963, shook Nina deeply, making her realize that the music she had been performing until then was no longer enough. She took a frontline position in the civil rights struggle, more aligned with Malcolm X than with pacifist Martin Luther King. From that moment on, Nina became fully aware of her identity as a woman, Black, musician, and activist. It’s no coincidence that in 1966, Nina Simone presented herself to the public with Afro hair: her appearance became a spokesperson for Black pride.

During the show, the light also breaks into the audience. Why this choice?The light brings into play the spectator’s gaze, in a space filled with exchanges and relationships. There is an audience present, watching, breathing, silently participating and listening. During her concerts, Nina could feel the reactions of the audience, absorbing them, turning them into fuel and strength.

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The Human Voice of Nina Simone According to Fanny & Alexander, by Anna Passatore | Fermata Spettacolo, May 31, 2024

A grand piano, its keys illuminated with light at the secret touch of a performer, long absent from the musical stage, yet suddenly appearing in Milan from who knows where. This is the unexpected presence of Eunice Kathleen Waymon, better known as Nina Simone. An ebony-colored body fills a dark décolleté, gradually illuminated by hues of blue, purple, and red, reflecting onto the stage and, at times, the audience. This audience is called upon, in its political responsibility, to step out of the comfortable role of passive observer. Nina watches them. Nina interrogates them. These are colors with symbolic values, evoking situations and emotions that resonate in the lyrics of her songs: the sorrow of blues sentiment, the blood of the civil rights struggle, the purple of Alice Walker’s novel and women’s liberation movements. It is an introspective yet direct narrative, with soprano Claron McFadden recreating before us, with sensitivity, the figure of the artist who passed away in 2003, in the show Nina by Fanny & Alexander, seen at the Teatro Grassi in Milan, as part of the Festival Presente Indicativo at the Piccolo Teatro.

Exposed to singing and music from the moment she was born, Nina dreamed as a child of becoming the first African American classical pianist. But fate was not on her side: after attending the Juilliard School in New York, she failed the entrance audition for the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, simply because of her black skin. Was this due to lack of merit? No, it was simply because of her race. But the doubt remains, and the discrimination she faced became a powerful driving force in her artistic biography. Her rigorous study of Bach, Chopin, Rachmaninov, Beethoven, and Liszt gave her a solid foundation, both in execution and composition, on which to rely.

Her voice, now warm, now harsh, is unmistakable, as are her words. Poetic words with full adherence to her intimate and social reality, born from the need to “communicate something to someone.” This is how she explains the origins of her poetry. It’s so simple, yet so far removed from an unnecessary mainstream scene. Her songs reveal a deep awareness: of anger, of the fear gripping African Americans, and of the beauty of her people that must be celebrated. Black is the color of her lover’s hair (“Black is the color of my true love’s hair”). But black is also the color of women stripped of their identity, subjugated to male power, like Aunt Sarah, Saffronia, Sweet Thing, and Peaches in “Four Women.” Nina could write delicate ballads (“Little Girl Blue”), sometimes expressing the oppression of women who love too much. Or she could voice the condemnation of slave owners who would not be claimed by God nor Satan, condemned to lie forever in the stench of their graves. This appears in “Dambala,” a cover of the Haitian poet Exuma’s song, a spiritual evoking the Ioa wodu, spirit of wisdom and fertility.

There is also “Mr. Backlash Blues,” with lyrics by Langston Hughes, a figure from the Harlem Renaissance. After the 1963 assassination of African American activist Medgar Evers and the bombing of a Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama, by the Ku Klux Klan, Nina launched an invective against the persecution of African Americans in Mississippi Goddam and committed herself to civil rights battles alongside Martin Luther King. Nina Simone now also demands that her people reconnect with the identity that had been stripped from them, to become aware of it: she leaves the United States for Liberia. How far she has come from her childhood dream as a young black girl from North Carolina.

In her music, rhythm powerfully expresses itself, generated by breath and the heartbeat. It’s a rhythm that accompanies us from the first moments of life, and in a piece dedicated to Myriam Makeba, Nina celebrates it. “The human voice is the purest instrument,” the performer had said at the start. It is an instrument that Claron McFadden uses with balance, between tenderness, pity, and indignation. It is the almost exclusive instrument with which she conveys her narrative through music, which she collaborates on with Damiano Meacci, along with percussion by Adama Gueye.

The dramaturgy is by Chiara Lagani. Subject, direction, and lighting are by Luigi De Angelis, who, listening to Nina Simone’s interviews with eyes closed, drew inspiration from the distinct mark of her “wounded sonic fingerprint,” which is reinterpreted on stage by the performer using remote acting techniques.

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Philippe Mangeot

There was great commotion yesterday in the vast underground hall of IRCAM: we thought we saw Nina Simone pass by, and we even heard her sing. It was her and yet it wasn’t her; it was her rhythm and intonations but not exactly her vocal range; it was her phrasing and her words, passing through the body-medium of the admirable Claron McFadden. After the performance, director Luigi De Angelis (from the Fanny & Alexander collective) explained what this “mimetic portrait” owes to the strange technique of remote acting (in French: hétéro direction). McFadden listened through an earpiece to Nina’s sung and spoken voice – particularly excerpts from the historic 1976 Montreux concert – and then conveyed it in turn, as though contaminated by it, but without ever imitating her. To add to the spectral quality of the performance, a mechanical piano played on its own on stage, seemingly activated by an invisible presence.

The result wouldn’t have been so beautiful if we hadn’t felt that something else was at play in the performance: the obvious sense of community (of sisterhood) between two African American singers who chose to live in Paris, the sharing of words and music that assert that Black lives matter, and that this is still not an obvious truth for everyone. It was, I believe, one of the most touching pieces I’ve seen in the 2023 edition of the autumn festival: in its own way, it resonated with the words of Angela Davis, who had been invited by the same festival just a few weeks earlier.