New Century Hall, Manchester
The biggest-selling act to have emerged from Africa this century first met at a school for the blind in Mali in the early 1970s. Subsequently married, Amadou Bagayoko and Mariam Doumbia have since received support from the likes of Manu Chao and Damon Albarn, but this show ? or rather "sensory experiment" ? took place very much on their own terms. Part of the Manchester international festival, it was staged in total darkness, to the point at which it was impossible to see your hand in front of your face, let alone if the couple in the row in front were snogging (instances of which were later reported by the technical team keeping an eye on the action with night-vision goggles).
"If you cannot see, your sense of sound becomes richer," Amadou, who lost his sight because of a congenital cataract in childhood, explained in advance. "I want the audience to hear the music just as Mariam and I hear it."
Nor was it a straightforward gig; hence the theatrical title, Eclipse. Instead, pre-recorded sounds of street life in Bamako, Mali's capital, started the performance as different scents were pumped into the room, before a narrator began the tale of the pair's epic journey to date. Interspersed with this, the duo ? plus seven-piece band ? launched into their Afro-pop blues, plunging the (seated) crowd into the kind of experience Amadou had promised.
As a theatrical piece, the pacing might be fiddled with slightly, and the suspicion is that most of the crowd felt too inhibited by the dark to let their hair down as they might at a normal show, but it more than succeeded as an experiment. If Eclipse tours worldwide ? as seems likely ? an even wider range of fans will surely fall for the duo's vivid humanity.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/jul/18/amadou-and-mariam
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