"If you don't come up here and dance for this next one, we're not gonna play," Anglique Kidjo warned the audience near the end of her performance in Spaulding Auditorium last night.
She hardly need have asked.
Kidjo, a Beninese-born, Brooklyn-based world-pop singer of renown, had worked the crowd into a frenzy by then, taking a nearly full auditorium divided almost evenly between Dartmouth students and Upper Valley residents and bringing it to its feet. Perhaps 80 audience members out of more than 100 who had been dancing along both walls of the auditorium made their way onto the stage after Kidjo's exhortation.
Audience interaction was just one of the strong suits in a performance by a pop singer with a dynamic, powerful voice and a corresponding feisty demeanor.
Kidjo first took the stage clad in a shiny, skin-tight pink top and a shaggy purple suit. She opened her mouth and laid down three show-stopping songs in a row without pausing to talk to the audience until she'd won their respect.
She accomplished that, in part, by a rendition of her best-known song, the European hit "Batonga." It seemed as fresh and energetic as the newest material tackled by Kidjo and her six-piece band, who have recently toured with both the Dave Matthews Band and Macy Gray. Allison Cornell, on electric violin, provided the hook in "Batonga" and added strong contributions to others, as well.
The chemistry between the band members was more than evident. Laughs and banter between them were frequent, especially when the music was going particularly well. A costume change for Kidjo gave the band's rhythm section a chance to show off, as Brazilian percussionist Gilmar Iglesias Gomes, Houston drummer Jeremy Gaddie and Cameroonian bassist Richard Hammond jammed like Deadheads.
Kidjo frequently talked to the audience between songs as the night wore on, explaining the stories behind the songs, which she sang in a handful of languages. The sole English-language song of the night was a cover of Jimi Hendrix's "Voodoo Chile" -- an innovative reworking, to be sure, but disappointing compared with Kidjo's own compositions.
Those songs, as she carefully explained, treated a variety of socially-conscious themes, from remembering slavery and considering its continuing effects to examining and celebrating the nature of freedom.
Musically, there is nothing revolutionary about Kidjo's work. Her songs blend traditional African sensibilities (if not their actual sounds) with modern world pop, and she is not afraid to explore other influences, such as the Brazilian sound she will try to incorporate on her forthcoming album, to be released next spring on Columbia Records. But there are other artists -- from the Neville Brothers to Youssou N'Dour (whose cancelled date Kidjo replaced) -- who do that too, and do it just as well.
Where Kidjo shines, then, is in her energy. For all but a few moments of her one-and-a-half-hour performance she seemed spectacularly animated, swaying her hips sensuously and dancing her way around the stage, causing hundreds of cynical college students and graying 40-somethings alike to lose their self-consciousness, if only for 90 minutes.
Not that Kidjo didn't have more where that came from. "Hey," she muttered during a Q-and-A after the performance, "I could do this for hours if you guys wanted me to."
