Beyoncé’s “Renaissance Tour” (as in Renaissance, re-Birth?) is a majestic fresco that can help – at first glance – remotion.

 

The “Renaissance Tour” (May/October 2023) is indeed an impressive show. A modern circus-game of cubital images and wall-of-sound PA's plus dozens of hominids to drug our senses with a sensitive hyper-stimulation that (during the show: two and a half hours!) turns into a debilitating, almost pre-hypnotic, cerebral orgy of sounds, colors and memes.

 

The sheer amount of media utilised in the Tour suggests that this is a production only few can afford. To the point that it pales in comparison the apotheosis of smoke and fireworks - yep! - used by "sir" Elton John while singing Rocket Man at Glastonbury 2023.

 

Often surrounded by at least a dozen dancers, here is “Bey” (read: bii) from the central stage walking like a model on the very long catwalk, in an anthology of lights, smoke and aerial shots that two screens a good fifty meters wide allow you to enjoy in detail. The theme of the costumes is “an Afro-futurist fantasy” with clothes by well-known designers (and white: Alexander McQueen, Courreges, Balmain, Ferragamo, Stella McCartney) mixed with the propaganda of space suits and the bot-Maria from Metropolis.

 

(...)

 

The concert’s detachment from its musical reason for being and its morphing into a ballet/light-show/erotic film/night out soundtrack, without interruption, is noteworthy.

 

If Miles Davis at Plugged Nickel was there to play, here “Bey” and his crew want to colonize our unconscious. In this light I read the animations of Artificial Intelligence, the spatial and pro-technical transhumanist leitmotif, the mechanical robots that rotate around the Diva, the primadonnaism of seeing her mount a silver horse. And then sentences, martially imprinted on the screens: “Serve” (serve), “Mind/Control” (mind/control = mind control), the jeux de mots “Beyoncé/Opulence.” From the hubbub emerges a quote from Einstein (‘imagination is more important than knowledge’) and a truism attributed to Jim Morrison (‘who controls the media controls the mind.’)

 

I said at the beginning that “at first sight” this mega tour (which has set a series of attendance and box office records) helps to remove bad thoughts.

 

It is possible that these - however - boil in our unconscious as soon as they are teased by para-subliminal messages, mixed with playful and sensual gender fluid rituals and hyper-magna opulence.