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Michael Jackson would have turned 55 last week. Wherever he is, he must be pleased to see a statement he made to Ebony in his final interview come to fruition: “You want what you create to live,” he said. “Be it sculpting, painting, music, composition. That is why to escape death I attempt to bind my soul to my work.”
Four years after his unexpected death, Jackson’s words could hardly be more prescient. His artistic legacy is flourishing. The salacious details of a lengthy, ongoing wrongful-death trial have hardly made a scratch on public opinion (indeed, those who have followed it closely seem to find him more sympathetic and human than he ever was during the final decades of his life). Meanwhile, a new generation of Jackson fans — added to the considerable global fanbase that grew up with the pop star — have made him the most influential deceased artist of the 21st century.
Don’t believe it? Consider the evidence: Jackson still remains the biggest-selling artist on iTunes; contemporary pop is a virtual homage to the Original Thriller (see Daft Punk, Justin Timberlake, Robin Thicke, Bruno Mars and Jay Z, the latter of which name-checks the King of Pop multiple times on his latest album, Magna Carta, Holy Grail); in 2012, Cirque du Soleil’s “Michael Jackson Immortal World Tour” out-grossed the world tours of Lady Gaga, Coldplay and Kanye West, recently surpassing $270 million dollars in global revenues; a critically acclaimed documentary celebrating the 25th anniversary of Jackson’s Bad album, directed by Spike Lee, premiered to a standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival, before airing on ABC in primetime on Thanksgiving night; meanwhile, Jackson is drawing increased attention from scholars and academics, including several new essay collections and a recent course at Duke University by Dr. Mark Anthony Neal entitled “Michael Jackson and the Black Performance Tradition.”
Add to this list Cirque du Soleil’s remarkable new residency show at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, “Michael Jackson ONE.” In a special birthday performance on Thursday, August 29th, the achievements previously catalogued were made concrete. Far from the typically superficial sensory onslaught one finds in Vegas, “Michael Jackson ONE” offers a socially conscious, soulful, invigorating experience. By the end of the show, the sold-out crowd — cross-generational and diverse — was not only standing and clapping, they were dancing in the aisles.
“Michael Jackson ONE” follows Cirque’s record-setting “Michael Jackson Immortal World Tour,” which is currently visiting stadiums throughout Asia, before traveling to Australia, New Zealand and eventually South Africa and South America.
Where the “Michael Jackson Immortal World Tour” offered a raucous, exhilarating, if occasionally uneven and unsubtle tribute to the King of Pop, “Michael Jackson ONE” (also written and directed by Jamie King, this time in coordination with Montreal native Welby Altidor) feels like a second draft. The result is a richer, more focused, and evocative show.
A collaboration between Cirque and the Michael Jackson Estate, “Michael Jackson ONE” benefits in numerous ways from its permanent setting in Mandalay Bay’s fully-refurbished, state-of-the-art theater (which previously housed “The Lion King”). The audience is literally enveloped by screens and sound, lights and acrobats. The elaborate, baroque-style set was designed by François Séguin and draws inspiration from the cover of Jackson’s Dangerous album, “Leave Me Alone” video, and Neverland Ranch. These allusions appropriately highlight both the circus-like elements of Jackson’s life in the public spotlight as well as the eccentric spirit that embraced what Mikhail Bakhtin described as the “carnivalesque” — a communal creativity that dissolves hierarchies of race, gender, class and nation.
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Indeed, part of what makes the show so effective is the tension it allows to develop between the parasitic and the dialogic. The show’s antagonistic presence is the faceless and amoral Mephisto, a techno-media-amalgam — composed of TVs, cameras, microphones, surveillance equipment, and probing tentacles — that brings freshly updated dimensions to Faust’s soul-seducing Mephistopheles. Mephisto not only represents the perilous industry Jackson confronted as a star since the age of nine, but the Information Age-apparatuses of power and exploitation that threaten to consume us all.
READ MORE: (BIG Article) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joe-vogel/michael-jackson-one_b_3853407.html
Source: huffingtonpost / MJ-Upbeat.com
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