Sonia Boyce, Turner Contemporary review — exhilarating improvisation makes new listeners of us all

What would it feel like to be truly free — for versatile solo singers at the top of their game to improvise together unconstrained by personal inhibitions, social expectations, pre-assigned roles or even language? What might that freedom sound like, how liberating could it be to listen in? That radical proposition underlies Sonia Boyce’s installation “Feeling Her Way”, which won the Golden Lion last year for the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale and is now at Turner Contemporary in Margate.

The unruly soundscapes of the five-room multimedia work bleed into one another as the visitor proceeds. The opening four-channel video is her 12-minute edited collage of a warm-up session that Boyce, who emerged as a leading figure in Britain’s black arts movement of the 1980s, instigated at London’s Abbey Road Studios. The singers in London were the jazz vocalist Jacqui Dankworth; pop-folk singer-songwriter Tanita Tikaram; and Poppy Ajudha, a soul singer from south-east London’s underground jazz scene, collectively producing spontaneous polyphony. A fourth performer, the jazz-classical composer and vocalist Sofia Jernberg, prevented from travelling to London by the vagaries of quarantine, was recorded throat-singing in Stockholm.

Initially hesitant — they had neither met nor improvised in public before — the three soloists were steered by the composer Errollyn Wallen into abandoning ultra-rehearsed polish for mainly non-verbal call-and-response, fuelled by a heady sense of post-lockdown release. Jernberg’s clip is arranged into a seeming duet with Dankworth in the climax of an at times funny and ultimately exhilarating work. Wallen’s instructions freed the performers from the cage of others’ perceptions, not least the obligation to be poised, seductive, feminine. They growl like lions, bark, pant and chime like church bells, merging yet distinct in their crescendos. The prompt to sing “I am Queen” exposes a deep-seated urge to compete for status. “No you’re not, I am queen,” Dankworth trills with a smile, defusing an incipient battle of the divas.

The abstract sounds recall both American jazz scat and European Dada, which emerged at the birth of Modernism from the collective traumas of slavery and the first world war. Dada spurned the rational language that led to the trenches, and its Cabaret Voltaire, Boyce told me during a preview at Margate, looked to jazz. Free-form is primal. As she added, the “first voice we hear before we know who we are” is our mother’s voice in the womb. Her investigations of a world beyond societal preconceptions are at the heart of her oeuvre and of this layered work, which is as much about listening and re-evaluating what surrounds us but that we take for granted, as it is about expression.

The dramatic staging merits a closer look. Highly polished sculptures alluding to pyrite or fool’s gold form reflective seating for the audience. In the first room and three of the following rooms, each given over to one or two of the singers, there are distinct tinted videos and tessellated wallpapers using fragments of productions stills, from studio mics to flower-strewn shoes. This staging harks back to the warmly patterned backgrounds in Boyce’s early drawings, which reflected her childhood in east London and her Caribbean heritage, but grew menacing or subversive in figurative pastels such as “Lay back, keep quiet and think of what made Britain so great” (1986), with its thorny black flowers, critically alluding to the English rose. Together with the shiny gold chairs, the wallpaper in “Feeling Her Way”, which alludes to the music industry, invites questioning about appearance and reality: the value attached to, or denied, the immense skills on show.

The move from Venetian lagoon to English seaside marks a bittersweet homecoming for a work that stems from Devotional Collection, the artist’s growing archive of black British women (in the broad 1980s sense of African and Asian which she embraces) in music. Here, discount albums from charity shops, some with second-hand price tags, are displayed on golden plinths, including records by artists such as Dankworth’s parents, jazz greats Cleo Laine and John Dankworth, and Shirley Bassey.

Hinting at the industry’s skewed power structure, they seem to ask which voices do we value. Glamorous cover shots suggest talents belittled. On one cassette, Vanessa-Mae plays her violin thigh-deep in the sea’s waves. “Die poor or/Give them what they want,” Ajudha sings in her a cappella blues composition “Demons” in her room. In Tikaram’s: “I’ve got so much more to give.” At the grand piano for her first recorded improvisation, Tikaram composes five song segments from scratch in an astonishing surge of creativity unleashed.

A concurrent exhibition at the gallery forms a real-life complement to Boyce’s staged encounter. Banned, curated by a local artist and jazz singer, Sabina Desir, is about US Air Force servicemen and women, still effectively segregated, who were stationed in the area in the 1950s. While white personnel were largely billeted in Margate and Broadstairs, African-American soldiers were consigned to Ramsgate along the coast. Alongside “Airmen Portraits” by Charlie Evaristo-Boyce (no relation), which comprises screen-prints of military yearbook photos, the exhibition documents how imported Jim Crow laws were both enforced and resisted by British people. The involvement in this companion show of the servicemen’s local descendants is proof of how the colour bar was defied.

It reinforces what Boyce described to me as her own abiding interest: “What happens when people encounter each other for the first time: the anxiety of whether someone is a friend or foe; how we negotiate differences [and] get to the point when we’re in tune with each other.”

To May 8, turnercontemporary.org, then Leeds Art Gallery, May 25-November 5