Bassline Live is excited to get this year started with the first of the Bassline Live at The Lyric Theatre series at Johannesburg's Gold Reef City. This year the Bassline is taking the series live experience up a notch with multi-disciplinary artist collaborations. This first concert of the series, on February the 25th 2022, in association with BET, will showcase Msaki as the headline artist presenting “Platinumb Heart”. Part of the show will include a collaboration with dancer, choreographer Kristi-Leigh Gresse, the current Standard Bank Young Artist Award Winner for Dance. The support act for the evening is Vinnie Mak from ALTBLK>>, the home of unique African independent artists, founded by Msaki.
Doors open 7:00pm, show starts at 8:00pm. Tickets cost between R200.00 and R400.00 and are available at Computicket.
With the release of Msaki’s sophomore double album, Platinumb Heart, in November last year, she pushed boundaries giving both her singer-songwriter acoustic and electronic/producer sides time to shine. This double album earned her millions of streams worldwide, radio chart success, consecutive days of Twitter trending and immense support from both digital stores and media alike, for her ambitious, brave, heart opening and genre defying offering.
"I am excited to perform again at the Bassline Live at the Lyric Theatre, our performance last May was one of my favourite shows of the year. It's always great to work with the Bassline family, for this show I will collaborate with dancer Kristi-Leigh Gresse during my set and my brother Vinnie Mak, from the ALTBLKcontinua community, who recently moved from the Eastern Cape to Jozi, will open the show with his Buffalo City Blues." Says Msaki.
Kristi-Leigh Gresse has collaborated with a remarkable variety of South Africa’s dancers and choreographers, developing her own ‘voice’ as an artist as her work has cohered thematically around the politics of the body as well as expressions of collective and individual identity. She won a Standard Bank Ovation Gold Award for 'Sullied' at the National Arts Festival in 2018 and went on to win the South East Dance Award at the Brighton Fringe Festival in 2019, before being commissioned to produce a dance screen offering for the digital JOMBA! Festival in 2020.
Kristi-Leigh shares her feelings on the upcoming collaboration with Msaki: “Now more than ever we feel the distance between ourselves and the rest of the world. A collaboration such as this one provides a space for two or more individuals to explore their shared experiences in a creative space. Learning from one another. Inspiring innovation and adding to the collective conciseness. And thus, for me the work develops into a performance that can potentially be both mesmerising and transformative for anyone who gets to experience it.”
Paige Holmes, Creative Director of Bassline says: “Audiences and fans of Msaki are in for such a treat, getting to see and hear her performing in all her glory within a live creative space that truly can’t be replicated and or felt through a digital space! We are also so amped, with restrictions having been lifted, allowing decent audience numbers, the artists and audiences can sense and feel that live performance electricity so sorely missed over the past two years”
Says Brad Holmes of Bassline Live, " After a tough past two years, the Bassline is relieved and proud to still be promoting great music and supporting and growing wonderful talent."
