It’s easy nowadays to dismiss folk stories. We’re in the first quarter of the 21st century living amid the embers of a dying planet, yet folklore and myth have ways of reimagining and enlivening current concerns and making them fresh.
From the moment award-winning Cécile McLorin Salvant (she’s won three consecutive Grammys) appeared onstage for the UK premiere of Ogresse, she had the audience in the palm of her hand. She has a huge following thanks largely to her work on the jazz circuit.
Ogresse is the story of a beastly female monster who lives in the forest, inflames the townspeople, intrigues the porcelain maiden, and meets her nemesis – the loving and lying woodsman. The Ogresse is happy and free but she’s seen as a freak. And she’s dangerous; if she pleases, she can swallow the earth in one go.
Salvant plays all the roles in songs that bounce from bluegrass and blues to 1940s-style showtunes (think of Billie and Ella) along the way. There’s an excellent 13-piece orchestra of multi-instrumentalists (conducted by Darcy James Argue) on stage but it’s Salvant’s voice that is the real hero. She has colossal tonal range and slides from one musical style to another with the alarming ease of a jazz genius.
In truth, Ogresse defies categorisation – it is at once music theatre, song cycle, and cantata, but also not quite any of them at the same time. Salvant wrote the fierce and funny lyrics, music, and story by melding Haitian myth and the account of a 19th-century South African woman, Sara Baartman, who was horrifically paraded around Europe in a ‘freakshow’. Yet Ogresse is full of humour, poetry, and truly affecting pathos. It’s to be made into a full-length, animated feature film, a rough schematic of which plays distractingly on a screen onstage.
For those with an eye for the allegorical, there’s plenty here to sink the teeth into. For others, the sound of that voice is more than enough.