Culture & Community | International Festival of Arts & Ideas | Music | Arts & Culture | New Haven Green | Arts & Anti-racism
Angélique Kidjo and the New Haven Symphony Orchestra (NHSO). Lucy Gellman Photos.
On one end of the New Haven Green, Angélique Kidjo leaned into the mic, and prepared to put her whole heart into “Malaika.” Beneath her, a carpet of strings rolled out across the stage and toward an audience of thousands. Her voice sailed over the Green, well past its flagpole and onto Chapel Street.
Just feet away, Awuor Onguru lifted her phone up to the stage, belting along to the lyrics as they brought her back to a childhood in Nairobi. Every so often, she leaned over to translate a line or two from the Swahili to English for her friends. Around her, children swayed atop their parents’ shoulders, delighting in the sound as dusk fell around them.
New Haven was in full force Saturday, as thousands gathered on the New Haven Green to hear Kidjo and the New Haven Symphony Orchestra (NHSO) ring in the International Festival of Arts & Ideas on the Alexander Clark Stage. After a full day of programming across New Haven, the evening culminated in a concert that focused on bringing the city together in a time of global divisiveness.
Top: Malakhi Eason and Thabisa embrace. Bottom: Mills and Gray.
The evening included veteran New Haven drummers Michael Mills and Brian Jawara Gray, as well as dancers Tia Cruz and Charliece Salters, both Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School and Eastern Connecticut State University grads who have gone on to dance professionally. As they danced in the night, it marked the start to a two-week calendar of 150 Arts & Ideas events. More on that below.
Even before Mills and Gray kicked off the night with their signature healing drums, a sense of energy crackled in the air, alive in the constant hum of conversation, peals of laughter and miniature pride flags that popped up across the Green. Taking the stage to cheers, Director of Programming & Community Impact Malakhi Eason looked out over a growing crowd, the sky above him clear after nearly a week of wildfire smoke.
“Let me hear the love!” he said, and the crowd roared back in appreciation. By the stage, couples snagged a few open patches of grass, a few bringing out picnic blankets and bottles of wine to welcome in an early summer. Halfway across the Green, Saddam Alshuwaykh wheeled his bike through the open walkways, savoring the last, honeyed hours of Saturday sunshine.
Brian Jawara Gray.
Back up front, Eason welcomed Mills and Gray, who grew up in New Haven and have been bringing the sound of their drums to the city’s neighborhoods for decades, sometimes when residents need to hear them most. As the sound rang out over the Green, amplified through the microphones, both musicians brought the audience into their set, which seeks to unite hearts and minds around the life-giving sound of the drum.
“This is when we come together y’all!” Mills said, and some members of the audience stood to dance along. “Hearts! Beat! Hearts! Beat!”
They had musical tricks up their batiked, brightly patterned sleeves: they always do. No sooner had Mills invited the audience to sing along than he and Gray were layering sound, chimes and extra percussion ringing out beneath the drums. Every so often, Mills added in a rumbling beat, building a whole percussive symphony.
Michael Mills and Ken Tedeschi.
The two added depth as they welcomed Ken Tedeschi, a veteran music educator in the North Haven Public Schools who is currently the assistant principal trumpet with the New Haven Symphony Orchestra. As he walked on, Tedeschi eased right into a sort of chopped-up, staccato take on Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer,” the trumpet wailing as he played. On the grass, it became nearly impossible not to sway and shimmy along.
In the audience, guitarist Ed Beverley made his way to the stage, his shoulders and hips already moving to the music. He swayed and rocked to the sound, closing his eyes until the rhythm surrounded him, and came up through the ground into his whole body. When his lids fluttered back open, part of him was still in New Haven, and part of him was on another plane entirely.
Born in Bristol and raised in New Haven, Beverley grew up playing music with Mills and doing martial arts with Gray, both of whom he now considers close friends. He can’t remember missing a single iteration of Arts & Ideas in its 28 years, he said—including a festival that the two opened decades ago. This year, he said, he was excited to see New Haven’s talent get its due on the main stage.
Ed Beverley.
“It’s a wonderful thing to see someone you grew up with performing up there,” he said, nodding to his nearly seven decades on the planet. “Dance, this music keeps you young. It soothes me.”
Just a few feet away, Mills and Gray were soloing at the lip of the stage, so close that Beverley could nearly touch them. “I need you to repeat after me!” Mills shouted from the stage, lifting his arms to the sky. “Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh!”
“Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh!” the audience half-sang, half-spoke back. It was good enough for Mills.
“La la la la la la la la!” he continued. His hands rarely left the drum. By the time the audience answered him, it felt like a quarter of the Green was moving along to the same beat.
It was the perfect introduction to the NHSO, which opened with Quinn Mason’s “A Joyous Trilogy” before welcoming Kidjo to the stage. As the first movement rose, wispy and unrushed in the warm evening, Maestro Alasdair Neale glowed at the podium, his eyes locked with musicians. He leaned forward, mouthing something imperceptible to the horns as his baton cut through the air. No sooner had woodwinds entered the fray and he lifted his heels, in a subtle, subconscious kind of dance that turned the whole stage into a celebration.
Neale, who leaves the NHSO after the 2023-24 season.
Backstage, Cruz and Salters went over their routines one last time before joining Kidjo on stage. Now dancers at The Lab in Meriden, both grew up in New Haven, and became close friends during their time studying dance at Co-Op. Speaking as she ran through her movements, Salters credited New Haven’s schools as the foundation of her dance education.
“It was where we learned everything we know,” she said.
When she performs, “I feel powerful,” Cruz chimed in. She called it an honor to dance alongside Kidjo, a five-time Grammy winner and champion of human rights who was recently named a recipient of the Polar Music Prize. Just a day before on the Green, Kidjo had joked that when she accepted the prize, she was able to get even the King of Sweden dancing.
Behind them, Neale stepped offstage for just a moment, taking Kidjo’s hand before he ushered her onto the stage. Even as Cruz and Salters continued to warm up, an ear-splitting cheer rose from the other side of the stage, a sign that she had arrived .
“This is a place where we get together, and tell the world there are possibilities,” she had said just a day before, before cutting a ribbon on the Alexander Clark stage. “There are solutions. We can be a better world if we all come together through arts and through education to create a country that can be a trailblazer in human rights, in everything that we stand for.”
Nowhere were those words more alive than during her set, which wove through multiple languages and decades of music making in which she has never stopped experimenting. After easing the audience in with a slow, full-bellied and translated interpretation of George Gershwin’s “Summertime,” she picked up the pace, and got the audience onits feet for the rest of the evening.
It was during her “Kelele,” off her 2010 album Õÿö, that the crowd came alive for the first time. At first, there were just a few whispers of movement at the front, where parents lifted their kids—and sometimes, friends’ kids—onto their shoulders to give them a full view of the stage. At the front, the singer-songwriter Thabisa trilled her tongue and bounced in excitement.
“Repeat after me!” Kidjo said, and sang the first line of the song to the crowd. When they repeated it back, she beamed. “Let’s go for it!”
On guitar, Dominic James joined in and wisps of 1980s Guinean dance filled the air as attendees clapped in time with the music. In one sonic world, the audience could have been in the basement of Barbès, listening to the blessing that is New Haven’s Mamady Kouyaté. In another, they were already halfway around the globe, taking in the breadth of a diaspora.
By the time Kidjo came in, attendees singing sweetly back to her, there was a full-fledged dance party close to the stage. Its youngest participants, clapping to the sound in arms and atop shoulders, squealed in delight as they danced, faces flushed in the fading heat. On stage, Kidjo kept a rhythm by clapping on her thighs and stomping her feet between verses. Her arms wove through the air, as if she was reaching out to every listener.
In the crowd, her jubilance seemed to catch on. Singing along to her cover of Miriam Makeba’s “Malaika,” Onguru said that she was thrilled to be there “in my mom’s stead,” after years of listening to Kidjo. Every so often, she lifted her phone to record, singing along as a life-sized Kidjo on the stage became a second, smaller Kidjo on her screen.
Thembi Gausi (in the red) and Awuor Onguru (in green shirt).
Born and raised in Nairobi, Kenya, Onguru is now a rising senior at Yale, where she is studying English, working as a writer and reporter and also singing opera. Growing up, “I wanted to have a voice like hers,” she remembered. Years later, that arts foundation has sent her on her own creative journey. She pointed to the significance of seeing an African woman on the global stage.
As Kidjo sang, she balanced that enthusiasm with a rallying cry for human rights, which has been a central part of her platform and her message since her first album, Parakou, in 1989. Before dipping into her 2015 song “Nanae,” she praised her father as her first feminist icon—and then called for a world where women do not have to fight for basic human rights every single day.
“This song is dedicated to women here on this earth,” she said to cheers and thunderous applause. “Abuse against women has become a political weapon. My father … he allowed my mom to be free.”
Longtime friends Tina Santoni and Helene Sapadin, who said they've both been coming to the festival since its inception in the 1990s.
To a twanging, spare guitar from James and percussion that entered unhurriedly, she called out over the Green, her voice undulating as it carried. In the audience, where attendees had roared their agreement just moments before, listeners quieted and swayed to the music. Even through a language barrier, they held onto each note.
The stillness didn’t last for long. As she moved through decades of her oeuvre, jumping from Swahili to Yorùbá to Fon as attendees stood to dance in the walkways-turned-aisles, on the grass, and even further back at the Green’s flagpole. As they sauntered through the Green, friends Helene Sapadin and Tina Santoni took hands and began to salsa to the sound.
By the finale—her 2002 “Afirika,” one of the tracks for which she is perhaps best known—it seemed that the whole space was moving. At the front of the stage, a dad lifted his infant to the light, so that they could see everything unfold in real time. 
Awuor Onguru: There in her mom's stead.
No sooner had she finished than cries of “One more song!” filled the air. Taking Neale’s hand, she obliged with an encore of “Kelele,” sending New Haven off singing into the cool night.
The concert is one of 150 events that will grace New Haven in the next two weeks, from outdoor fashion shows and all-abilities dance performances to slam poetry, drag, beekeeping tutorials, silent theater and music from some of the city's most beloved sons and daughters.
"I want you to come," said Executive Director Shelley Quiala, who began her tenure in 2020, during a press conference for the festival last Friday (watch that here). "You are invited. It is not exclusive. This is free. Come down! Making sure that you have a chance to be part of this is important to us."
To learn more about programming at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, click here.