Wonderful, Wonderful, WOMADelaide

Yes, it was wet, yes it was windy, yes, it was a little chillier than your average Adelaide March, but WOMADelaide 2010 was still a whole lot of fun.

France’s Babylon Circus (pictured to the left), were totally insane, playing on the main stage to an amped-up crowd of thousands, inviting women up to dance with them, play-fighting on stage, jumping all over the place.

Ethiopia’s Mahmoud Ahmed (pictured above), as if he were still playing to the packed clubs of the Golden Age of swinging Addis, crooned and danced before an enraptured audience, with his fabulous backing band, from Brittany, the Badume’s Band.

Hungary’s Besh O Drom were my highlight. Ever since I picked up a copy of their album Cant Make Me! at Second Spin, I’ve hoped and prayed they’d make an appearance in Australia, and when they did, I was salivating with anticipation. The experience didn’t disappoint. Playing a unique sort of klezmer-meets-gypsy-meets-Hungarian-folk-meets-jazz, the band got everyone well and truly moving.

The inspiring Mariem Hassan, of Western Sahara (pictured right), gave two outstanding performances. Through a screening of her documentary, The Voice of the Sahara, and as part of her Taste the World session (in which she cooked lovely, lean South Australian camel meat), Mariem drew attention the situation in her homeland, currently partly occupied by Morocco, and struggling for independence.

Other standouts were Kamel El Harrachi, the Algerian oud player; self-proclaimed party band, The Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, from Chicago; and Melbourne’s own, excellent, VulgarGrad and Unified Gecko.

It’s worth mentioning that although the festival gained an extra day, and ran from Friday night to Monday night, instead of ending Sunday night, the lineup didn’t appear to be greatly extended, so the atmosphere was less frantic than I expected. Very infrequent clashes of performance times and the fact that most artists played twice meant that I didn’t have to miss anyone. The flipside is that programming, at times, wasn’t full enough. The Saturday night and Sunday night schedule, for the last couple of hours, were virtually identical.

I was only able to be there until the Sunday night, so I did miss out on Ravi Shankar and Anoushka Shankar‘s reportedly brilliant performance.

This was my third, successive WOMADelaide, and all things being equal, I’ll be there again in 2011 — check out some more shots from this year, here.