Pop is usually light, effervescent and colorful, but Lady Gaga makes her own pop, edged with darkness, dark imagery and in her latest show with a danceable impulse that suggests parties in cemeteries, dances in the coffin. That particular way of approaching the crowd, from which she selects those who do not formally feel uncomfortable with shadows, those who, like her, have suffered in one way or another for not fitting the mold, dominated the sense of the gothic and ornate show that the New York diva offered in the first of her three concerts at the Sant Jordi. It was a different show, a montage that had a skeleton hanging on its back with which even the horror became pop and disco, shaking the crowd with smiles and pleasure. Weird is normal with Lady Gaga. Nothing causes distressing fear if behind it there is a knowing smile. Also, what is strange? What is normal?
The concert worked like a greyhound after a hare, fast, intense. It messed up. It was overwhelming. Pure audiovisual vertigo. Corpses, skulls, impossible dresses, fire, explosions, zombies, smoke, bandages, a chess board on the feet and songs so that they would not rest. Now blonde, now brunette; complex, operatic if not court-like costumes of the Sun King; attire with pleats, skirts with industrial crinoline, sashes, spikes and embroidery. All at the antipodes of containment, minimalism viciously murdered, crimson lips. After the explosion in monochromatic tones of the first act, red and green and its concatenation of themes at a gallop —Bloody Mary, Abracadabra o shit—, there came a second in which it shone Alejandroof course, and the long veil of Paparazziwith the enclosure already subdued. Both the presence and absence of light, generating dark environments and a 3D sensation on the stage, reminiscent of a lyrical theater (opera was played before the concert) leads us to think that, without a doubt, it was a success that this show was planned for closed venues. That’s where everything is closest and the outcome of the effects is precisely controlled, without leaks. The audience could feel themselves among the dancers, and those close to the hallway that entered the dance floor from the stage even saw Lady Gaga’s makeup without intermediaries. A goddess at hand, breathing rapidly due to the physical display she carried out with unfailing vigor.
The third act evoked club music, as if dancing among horrors were normal, and the audience, seeds inside maracas, danced as one dances when one has long expected to do so. The break came at the end of the recital, when Lady Gaga, after looking at the eighties with Shadow of A Manthat Michael Jackson always so present and danceable pop with Kill For Lovedecapella to Sant Jordi con Born This Way. Then, lowering the accelerated pulse of the show, she became tender, linking a series of mid-tempos and ballads, so that Million Reasons He filled the venue with cream-colored fireflies, those bracelets that Coldplay invented and that involve the person even more in the shows, making them part of what they admire. In ShallowLady Gaga sang in a boat that did not take her to the underworld, but to the happiness of her fans, located around the catwalk that saw her sail with majestic pause in a new evocation of the afterlife. Even Lady Gaga faced loneliness, alone with her keyboard singing Dis With a Smile y Dance In The Darka way of saying that on stage she can live alone, without crowds of dancers around her, cradled by thousands of dolls that swung, their bracelets illuminated, before her eyes. And then there are those who wonder how it is that stars find it difficult to leave the stage. The feeling of fullness of those moments must be a vital drug.
After dedicating Come to Mamaa piece that has not been featured in the tour repertoire, to Barcelona, the concert slid towards the final apotheosis. The “little monsters“(little monsters), as the star affectionately describes her fans, they were distraught, they felt as entertained as they were understood, in a connection that made the ties between stage and venue stronger. It is Lady Gaga’s achievement, to understand those who do not feel understood and to explain to us that in the monstrous and exaggerated, in the murky and crazy, in the dark and funereal there can be beauty, as in pain, a beauty that is expressed in another way, such that she walking crippled in Perfect Celebrityan ironic gesture. rang Bad Romancewith the queen spending fingers that looked like roots, and a How Bad Do U Want Me as an improvised climax, formally concluding the concert. Then it was deposited in the drawer where the great memories are stored, that drawer inhabited by a Lady Gaga full of voice who, with the recreation of her world in a pop key with roots in the eighties and nineties, has given a twist to the darkness. Dance or die, she said on stage. Die dancing, you might think.