Their music conjures private moments – so how did they pull off an arena show?

The band defies the stadium setting, delivering the same intensity, the same intimacy, as if they were playing a hazy club in the middle of nowhere. During Opera House, the final song of the evening, phone lights come on one by one, filling the room with a thousand fireflies. Smoke rolls across the stage. We are held, spellbound, until the final note fades.
Reviewed by Nadia Bailey

MUSIC
WOMADelaide
Botanic Park, Adelaide, March 7-10

I think I may have been a bat in a former life.

Observing the fruit bats in Adelaide’s Botanic Park – 40,000 share their home with WOMADelaide each year – I felt a distinct sense of kinship over the festival long weekend. With temperatures in the high 30s each day, the heat-stressed bats flapped their wings madly and did their best to stay cool. Festival attendees did the same, fanning themselves and seeking shady spots.

On two of the festival’s four days, high temperatures necessitated the closure of one music stage in daylight hours, with multiple shows relocated or rescheduled. Overhead sprinklers gave festival patrons (and fruit bats) a welcome mist, but I felt for the artists who performed in the blazing mid-afternoon sun. American singer-songwriter John Grant marvelled at how hot the black keys of his piano had become, though he struck them with conviction to match the dramatic heft of his vocals.

Some acts welcomed the extreme heat: Estonia’s Duo Ruut had escaped sub-zero temperatures at home, and enlivened a soporific afternoon audience with their wonderfully imaginative use of an Estonian zither (played in distinctly non-traditional ways, using a violin bow, drumsticks and bare hands to create a rich array of textures and effects).

Brazil’s Bala Desejo magically softened the sun’s glare into a seductive tropical breeze, coaxing audiences out of the shade with their buoyant Afro-Latin rhythms. And South African vocal group The Joy provided just that – joy – as their lush five-part harmonies drifted up to the towering pine trees above.

As the sun set in the evenings, twilight brought instant relief and revival. The bats emerged from their torpor to take nocturnal flight and over the entire festival site, the energy lifted.

PJ Harvey roamed the stage like an ethereal sprite, her flowing robes amplifying the theatrical, almost ritualistic effect of her music as she flitted between haunting ballads and distortion-flecked rock.

Ana Carla Maza turned her one-woman set into a Cuban fiesta with just her voice and a cello, transforming her eager audience into a mass of undulating bodies. Scottish trio Talisk also had the crowd kicking up dust and leaping with delight with contagious Celtic tunes.

After being controversially removed from last year’s lineup, Palestinian group 47SOUL were offered a prime slot on the biggest stage, where the welcoming and vocally supportive crowd embraced their heady shamstep rhythms and hip-hop-infused Arabic and English lyrics – some poetic, some pointedly political.

Ane Ta Abia (a collaboration between the Australian Art Orchestra and Tatana Village Choir) was as thought-provoking as it was affecting, blending traditional Motuan prophet songs with adventurous, contemporary jazz to reflect the complexities of life in post-independence Papua New Guinea.

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Whatever your mood, there was music to mirror it. Mariza’s arresting voice was there to hypnotise and beguile, as were Shabaka’s mystical, trance-inducing indigenous flutes.

Bangarra Dance Theatre’s The Light Inside hummed with quiet intensity, though I was more moved by Restless Dance Theatre, whose short but profound show Seeing Through Darkness gently explored perceptions of disability through movement, gesture and shadow play.

If it was euphoria you were after, there was Goran Bregovic with his irresistibly madcap Wedding and Funeral Band – or Nils Frahm, darting like a possessed scientist among banks of keyboards to concoct a pulsating, multilayered cosmos of celestial dimensions.

As I trudged towards the exit on Monday night, tired but satiated, a giant, illuminated helium balloon rose slowly into the air.

A single, shimmering acrobat was suspended just below the balloon, somersaulting and gliding above a sea of faces tilted upwards in delight.

It was an image that perfectly encapsulated the sense of wonder, community and togetherness that WOMADelaide captures so well – an oasis of calm and contentment in a complicated world.

Goran Bregovic performs on Thursday at Hamer Hall. Nils Frahm performs on Friday and Saturday, also at Hamer Hall.

Note: No star rating has been applied to the above review

Reviewed by Jessica Nicholas