Last night was a night when the visible and the invisible, the tangible and the intangible came together, as North Star shone in and over Belfast.
The show takes its title from the anti-slavery newspaper Frederick Douglass founded and edited, the title referring to Polaris, the bright star that helped guide those escaping slavery to the North.
And the Kwame Daniels-curated show at the spacious Belfast Telegraph Building was itself a guiding light to the new multicultural Belfast, featuring the talent that exists amongst our newest residents.
Although firmly rooted in the present, North Star also harked back to Douglass’s time in a Belfast arguably more enlightened than the one we live in today but also to the future as the show featured poetic contributions from children from the four schools involved in the Fighting Words project which asked pupils – native and immigrant – “Does Belfast Feel like home to you?”
It certainly did do Frederick Douglass. His renowned eloquence had all the power of music and North Star was a show which reflected that eloquence and power, from poet Nandi Jola – who referenced Robert McAdam in one of her poems – to the stunning voice of Winnie Ama, sent to Belfast via Ghana to soothe our souls and to Leo Miyagee, a young Zimbabwean-born rapper who sings of the crises of identity of the “new Irish” and much more.
The performers were on platforms in the middle of the auditorium and the audience could move freely around which gave the evening an easy flow as they were attracted to the “stars” around them.
On the main stage, Derry’s Hannah Peel (‘The Queen of Headphone Dreamscapes’), created an ethereal electronic ambience when it was called for while an electric mix of A-listers including Grammy winning multi-instrumentalist and DJ Kaidi Tatham, Joseph Leighton, Ben Flavelle, Steve Davis, Rick Swann and Thomas Annang gave us everything from jazz, funk, soul, and everything in between.
(Did I detect a Sun Ra vibe too?)
Counter-intuitively, they were joined onstage by the wonderful Arc String Quartet who added to the sonic soundscape while the PVN Gospel Choir, directed by Angela Ifontaja, raised everything up onto an even higher plane.
The show lasted 77 uplifting minutes, one minute for every tear of Frederick Douglass’s life, but it says something about Belfast’s commitment to the anti-slavery cause that we now have a statue to Douglass in Lombard Street, and, coincidentally, at the same time as North Star was lighting up the Telegraph building, there was a talk taking place in Clifton Street in the Life and Times of Thomas McCabe, the Belfast-man who, in 1786, spoke so vehemently against Waddell Cunningham’s proposal to set up a slave ship company in Belfast, that the attempt failed.
When in Belfast in 1845/6, Frederick Douglass was presented with a Bible by the Belfast Anti-Slavery Society.
One of the lessons he took from the Good Book, he said, was “If you claim liberty for yourself, then grant it to your neighbour.”
It’s a lesson we should live by today, with Douglass still our North Star.
North Star, as part of the Belfast International Arts Festival, continues tonight at the Belfast Telegraph Building.
www.belfastinternationalartsfestival.com for more information