Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine

Julia Bullock brings Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine to The Barbican Hall on Tuesday 20 October, starting at 20:00. It's a song cycle built around the life and legacy of Joséphine Baker—artist, activist and icon of resistance—and Bullock takes the stage to reincarnate her.

The work is directed by opera director Peter Sellars and pulls together opera, jazz, spirituals and early 20th-century French music hall, with spoken interludes by the poet Claudia Rankine. Baker's songs are re-imagined by Pulitzer prize-winning composer Tyshawn Sorey, whose writing fuses improvisational jazz with classical forms. The production originated at the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam and runs about nine hours and twenty minutes without an interval, so it's a long one—you'll want to clear your whole evening for it.

Bullock is an artist in residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, Cal Performances in Berkeley and the San Francisco Symphony. She's performed in Antony and Cleopatra and El Niño at the Metropolitan Opera, created roles in Fire Shut Up in My Bones, Upload and Girls of the Golden West, and has appeared in recital at Carnegie Hall, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Kennedy Center and Wigmore Hall.

Tickets start from £24 standard (£20 plus a £4 transaction fee), with a Young Barbican price of £18 for those aged 16–29. Members Plus and Members get 20% off, and Corporate Members 25% (up to two tickets per booking). The performance is at The Barbican Hall, Barbican Centre, Silk Street, London EC2Y 8DS, on Tuesday 20 October at 20:00.