On the final day of Always, Already There, the Barbican turns toward the voice—not as ornament, not as background, but as witness.
Worlds Like Freedom takes place on Sunday 25 October 2026 at 4.30 pm in the Silk Street Music Hall, with tickets from £22.50 plus booking fee. Part of the Barbican’s Always, Already There: the Afrodiasporic avant-garde festival curated by acclaimed vocalist, movement artist and composer Elaine Mitchener MBE, this event offers something both intimate and uncompromising: a compendium of Black Art Song focused on the female voice, devised by leading soprano Gweneth Ann Rand (pictured) and pianist Allyson Devenish.
Where much of the avant-garde is framed through abstraction, Worlds Like Freedom reminds us that experimentation can also be carried in language—through breath, phrasing, and the emotional architecture of text. Here, the voice becomes a site of memory and meaning, holding histories that are too often softened, edited, or made “presentable” for concert halls.
This carefully shaped sequence includes Shawn Okpebholo’s settings of Langston Hughes, works that move through themes of racial injustice, hope, and humanity. Hughes’ words arrive with their familiar clarity, but in song they take on another kind of force—less like a quotation from history and more like a living pulse, still pressing on the present.
Also featured is Jamaican composer Mikhail Johnson’s Praise to the Jamaican Mother of Art, a work that reaches back to the figure of the First Mother—imagined as an enslaved African whose art emerged from unspeakable circumstances: unsigned, unknown, yet foundational. Johnson’s piece doesn’t leave that history sealed in the past; it expands outward, drawing a line from erased labour then to the exploitation of artists today, asking what it means to create in systems that profit from the maker while denying them security, credit, or freedom.
In the context of Always, Already There, Worlds Like Freedom feels like a closing chapter written in full voice—one that centres the female perspective not as a theme, but as a necessary lens. A reminder that the avant-garde is not only about new sounds, but about new ways of hearing truth.
For further information, please visit the Barbican website.
Images provided courtesy of the Barbican
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