Restlessness | Marie Davidson live: or how a gig can become a dialogue about who we are, while we dance!
On stage, alone, is Marie Davidson, a figure who, at times during her performance, seems to carry the weight of a generation. With every beat, every word fired into the microphone, the Canadian artist doesn’t limit herself to music, Marie Davidson delivers a manifesto on stage that is as brutally raw and honest as it is sweet and satirical, and exposes (our) burden and fate of existing in a world saturated with pressures, constraints, impositions and repressions. Perhaps each choice carries with it something deeply political, visible or latent, coherent or inconsistent.
Assuming an evolutionary line in electronic music, passing through the seminal minimalism of Kraftwerk, who gave the soul to the machines, or the cocktail of Luke Slater (& his projects), who flooded techno with new influences, I write that Marie Davidson follows this crossroads, bringing with her a whole other vast sound palette, ranging from 80’s to post-punk, in a well-fused, modern and singular amalgam, with the weight and strength of someone who wants more than just to make the dance floor dance, Marie Davidson wants to make us think. .. While we dance!
During the performance, I found myself submerged in the troubled universe of ‘Work, consume, repeat’, with the encouragement of Marie ‘s magnetic and narcotic voice and, there’s no escaping it, at certain moments, every word was a stab of irony, feeling the inevitability of, while dancing, asking myself: Is this it? “This is your life?”
Marie Davidson ‘s philosophy (for want of a better word) resonates with Fight Club, a film that, twenty-five years ago, already announced the imminent collapse of a society worn down by the cult of productivity, consumption, what you own and what you want to own. Davidson, on this night in Porto, seemed to be raising that banner through her music.
Whether accompanying the lyrics or the music, an uncontrollable inner voice came up and whispered to me in the background for almost the entire concert: “You are not your bank account. You are not the clothes you wear. You are not the contents of your wallet. You are not your bowel cancer. You are not your grande latte. You are not the car you drive! You are not your fucking khakis!”.
While her music instigates and provokes the bodies of those watching, Marie seems to challenge us like Tyler Durden in Fight Club: “This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.“
And in a fleeting moment, one of those that remain for eternity, I realised that what truly united me, what intertwined and fused me with Davidson; beyond the scars we all have, the traces of what we were and what happened to us; was and is, the restlessness.
