Miceala Leon: Trance Atlantic

In Trance Atlantic, 2007 Nightlife Award finalist and MAC nominee (for Best Female Debut) Micaela Leon interprets songs associated with Josephine Baker, Jane Birkin and Marlene Dietrich — three distinct sexual icons of the 20th century who found their greatest success and deepest fulfillment in foreign lands, across significant bodies of water. Channeling the free-spiritedness of these long-distance ladies (Birkin left England to settle in France, Baker and Dietrich crisscrossed across the Atlantic) Leon explores her own urge to find her identity in a home away from home. With physical expressiveness bolstering her sensuous singing, Leon (who came to New York via London from her native Stuttgart last year) looks deep within to understand the impetus to travel, to quest (and perhaps to escape) that she shares with her subjects, while exploring the magnetic appeal of so-called exotic beauties, women, who by their very “differentness” become prophetesses of love and creativity.