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Singer Dua Lipa in Berlin: down-to-earth sporty spice update
Photo: Roland Owsnitzki / Votes
Masks, what masks?
Only a few people wearing a corona face mask were seen on Tuesday evening in the sold-out Mercedes-Benz Arena at Berlin's Ostbahnhof.
It's been like this in the capital for a few weeks now, where nightlife and concert life have almost gotten back to normal after two years of near standstill.
The joy of this can be felt at every small or large event.
But there is still a certain nervousness: Is what we are doing here really good?
Are we all sick tomorrow?
But the mask, the essential, unloved thing, still stays in the pocket more and more often.
Well, if everyone isn't wearing one...
In this state of mind, which oscillates between euphoria and a guilty conscience, it is all the more important for artists to appear particularly confident.
Like Dua Lipa, the British singer with Kosovo-Albanian roots, who became one of the pop stars of the moment during the pandemic, but has not yet been able to show her musical and aesthetic power on the big stage.
The 26-year-old is now making up for it all the more vehemently.
Dance, sweat, physicality and closeness
Two years, that's how long Dua Lipa had to wait before she was able to perform the songs from her second album "Future Nostalgia" live, so far it was only possible virtually.
The album contained numerous hits, including "Don't Start Now", "Levitate" or "Physical", which invited you to voguing in the living room during Corona: modern dance-pop with a lot of disco and retro appeal, music that perfectly formulated the claim of a young artist tailored to the spirit of the times to be a self-determined game changer.
But you also have to be able to transport this sound and this impetus live into large halls, arenas or stadiums.
On her tour in the USA and Great Britain, she has already shown that Dua Lipa can do this and also masters singing, and last night also in Berlin.
The predominantly young and female audience was already in the stands after the first booming bars.
There was nothing to be seen of Dua Lipa.
First, she hooked the crowd with Purple Disco Machine's club hit "Body Funk," played over the PA.
It says: »Work your body to the beat / body work will set you free.« After the long, paralyzing time of zoom communication, dance, sweat, physicality and closeness should dominate the evening.
Consequently, at the beginning - very sympathetically - the numerous dancers were presented individually in funny film trailer clips on the screen, which then also entered the stage, dressed entirely in dark red suits, while Dua Lipa in the sexy, sporty pink one-piece suit between them danced around and sang "Physical," that hit
Balloon hearts in disco ball optics
Dua Lipa, with her long, dark brown hair tied in a ponytail, has long been a sought-after fashion model and knows how to present herself, not so much as a glamor girl, but as a more down-to-earth sporty spice update who isn't ashamed of sweating either.
Every precisely choreographed
booty shake
by Lipa, and there were many of them, was greeted with frenetic cheers, the tempo remained extremely high for a good half hour, until Lipa handed cute balloon hearts in disco ball optics to Lipa during »Pretty Please« got and retired soon after for the first dressing break.
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The staging was perfectly thought through right down to the smallest stage design, from the crimson, sometimes brightly glistening disco lighting concept to the visuals on the screen, which presented a funny comic in the middle part in which Lipa as a sea amazon had to escape a nasty lobster monster.
He then wobbled huge and bright red as an inflatable prop behind her on the stage and suddenly looked very cute.
The segment of the show that played songs like "Love Again" and "Break My Heart" was about men and Lipa's resilience to her seduction and heartbreak skills.
The singer is single and recently told Vogue in an interview how she tamed overly pushy boys at school with a painful shoulder grip.
The fact that she has the will to do so is signaled by her usually very concentrated and therefore strangely severe-looking gaze with which she completes her choreographies, not cramped, but not yet as relaxed as a more experienced stage star is able to do.
The show perhaps left her a little too little room for spontaneity or announcements that went beyond a friendly, standardized greeting from the Berlin audience.
Not a word about the war in Ukraine, not a gag that happened out of turn.
In some places, the highly functional concept designed for maximum performance and power seemed too narrow, too focused on perfection.
But it is also exhausting to make it possible to experience physicality again and to allow it.
Lipa was all the more vehement and thrilling in the last act of her concert, which was introduced by a futuristic space intro almost reminiscent of Pink Floyd: planets and stars on the screen, disco balls lowered from the ceiling like celestial bodies, and a Air-drawn cage in which Lipa appeared in her third stage outfit, a rhinestone-encrusted onesie with an exposed butt, like a decidedly non-blonde Barbarella go-go queen.
Previously, she and her dancers, including two roller-bladed acrobats, threw an electrifying retro house party that began with '90s vocal house (»One Kiss«), reached a throbbing climax with »Hallucinate« and finally with Elton John ended up on screen, having sung his hit amalgam Cold Heart with Lipa, which also used his classic Rocket Man.
As Sir John grinned from the screen, Lipa and her crew sat on the stage at his feet like children watching Sesame Street.
But then followed the grimmer, bass- and funk-heavy finale with "Levitating" and "Future Nostalgia," in which Lipa, the new "Rocket Woman," showed up front on the catwalk stage as a solo performer with a wildly swaying hair propeller, almost more rock star than pop star.
Finally, as an encore, her greatest success so far, the single "Don't Start Now", with the last refrain verse of which she ended her dance lesson and sent the audience home confidently, but not like a diva: "Walk away / You know how". .
It's a pleasure to come back to this live and strength training session.