Big Freedia Brings Tidings of Summer’s Freedom to Millennium Park

Constantly striving to embrace the full scope of who Chicagoans are, Millennium Park’s Summer Music Series curatorial board has been known to make daring artistic choices.   A recent Thursday night performance at the Pritzker Pavilion was particularly special.  Bounce, an underground music form that blossomed in New Orleans housing projects went mainstream partially through the dynamism of rapper and personality extraordinaire, Big Freedia, a featured performer earlier this month.  Grounded in hip hop and embracing the bonding energy of call and response, the music sports a superfast beat and unbridled joy.  Twerking, where gyrating posteriors take center stage, can be considered bounce’s official dance form.    Exuberant, irreverent and hopelessly infectious, the full force of bounce power reverberated through the Millennium Park’s shimmering pavilion and out over its great lawn turned dance floor. 

Futurehood and Slo Mo, two queer collectives who celebrate and promote gender expansive artists, opened the show with bravado and humor.  Hosted by two Slo Mo’ stalwarts, (Your Godmutha) Tristen and (Party Mom) Kristen, the audience experienced a slice of Chicago’s entertainment landscape that rarely rises to elite stages.  That exposure was also evident with the FutureHood cheerleaders who warmed the crowd up with dancing that teetered on the acrobatic, toyed with the risqué and playfully upended sexual norms.  Cheerleaders don’t usually feature beards along with flowing locks and they’re usually not so willfully seductive. Dancing in pairs or in groups of four, they would alternate between taking performance lead and providing dance back up for other artists like rapper, Bambii, who goes by Oprah Gucci on Instagram.  Combined, dancers and vocalists filled the space with an anything’s possible energy that captivated and took root in the crowd.  That force fed the growing anticipation for Big Freedia and her arrival on stage. 

Summertime must mean blond because the cascading dark extensions most commonly associated with Freddia were gone.  Instead, she featured a short zesty blond number that radiated confidence and control.  Her smile did the same thing as she blew on stage with her own quartet of dancers; all female and all supreme bounce mistresses.  Something about their aura carried with it the deep R&B luster the DJ summoned with his spins on My Pony and Tevin Campbell’s Can We Talk a little earlier.  Freedia and her crew just made it present day, injected it with a club beat and gave the lyrics a strong dose of self-affirming optimism.

As energetically as Chicagoans were backing it up from their seats and on the grass, Freedia’s dancing foursome were providing a master class on bouncing that backside.  The Queen of New Orleans joined the exuberant fray displaying her own considerable skills of communicating through the language of bounce.  The heady party vibe and expressive freedom that filled the space completely altered the usual placid tone of concert performances.  Freedia’s Femmergy & Friends was a celebration of life that seeped into your pores and took possession of the hedonistic portion of your soul.  Ultimately, the concert brought with it an infusion of summer’s release and rejuvenation.

Bubbling with blues and the flair of contemporary Latin music, in coming weeks the bandshell will welcome Shemekia Copeland back to its stage as well as blues guitarist and singer Cedric Burnside.  Latin Grammy winning artist Carla Morrison will join Mexico City native Girl Ultra to wrap up the summer music series on August 21^st with contemporary cross genre Latin music and song.

Millennium Park Summer Music Series

https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/dca/supp_info/millennium_park9.html