Concert from Bangladesh: virtual reality music event revives 1971 Beatles charity concert—but without the white saviour complex
In response to the 1971 concert, the British-South Asian artist Shezad Dawood in collaboration with the Bangladeshi New York-based music producer Enayet Kabir will launch Concert from Bangladesh 2021 on 1 August, a "mixed-reality" concert that merges video performances from 13 Bangladeshi and South Asian musicians in an eclectic range of styles, ranging from hip-hop to experimental electronic. Each musician will be green-screened onto a virtual reality stage, designed by Dawood, that tours notable architectural and natural sites in Bangladesh and celebrates a country that, against all odds, has become one of Asia's foremost creative hubs.
"It is important to address what it means to be 'from' something, rather than 'for' it," says Diana Campbell Betancourt, the concert's curator and artistic director of the Samdani Art Foundation (SAF), which is partially funding the project. "Effective change is rarely achieved unilaterally. It comes from collaboration," she adds. With this simple, linguistic turn, Concert from Bangladesh attempts to reverse a problematic power dynamic inherent in its progenitor's name: that of a former colonial power coming to the rescue.
Spanning six centuries of musical traditions, Concert from Bangladesh features among its performers the mystic Baul singer Arif Baul accompanied by instrumentalists Nazrul Islam, Saidur Rahman, and Sohel. The show will climax with the Bangladeshi hip-hop duo Tabib Mahmud and 12-year-old Gully Boy Rana, whose socially engaged lyrics broach topics around climate emergency and poverty.
For the concert’s visual elements, Dawood drew on his previous decade of research into 20th-century South Asian architecture and the non-aligned movement during the Cold War, in particular the architect Muzharul Islam who pioneered Bangladeshi Modernism.
Indeed, much has changed in the past 50 years, not only for Bangladesh, but also around attitudes towards aid and globalism.
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