Angélique Kidjo. Five Grammys. Free Tickets. And There We Were.

Since arriving at UGA, we’ve learned that it pays to keep an eye on what’s happening around campus. You never know what might pop up on the calendar. This time, it was a concert.

Angélique Kidjo.

I have to admit, hers wasn’t a name I already had on my playlist. Then I did a little reading. Born in Benin, a five-time Grammy Award winner and one of the best-known voices in contemporary African music, Kidjo blends West African rhythms with Afrobeat, jazz, funk, R&B and pop. And just a few weeks before we saw her at UGA, she had received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, becoming the first African musician to receive the honour. And now she was coming to perform right here at UGA. Even better, the concert was free. All we had to do was reserve a ticket. So we hopped on the bus and headed to the concert.

Angélique Kidjo wasn’t at UGA just for the concert. From 8–10 September, as the Delta Visiting Chair for Global Understanding, she met with students and took part in a public conversation at Athens’ famous 40 Watt Club, before wrapping up her three-day visit with a concert at Hodgson Concert Hall. We made it to the final part.

And we discovered something else along the way: UGA has a proper concert hall. Hodgson Concert Hall seats around 1,100 people, including seats surrounding the stage, and it’s the kind of place that makes you forget for a moment that you’re on a university campus. By 7:30, when the concert began, the hall was full. In fact, the event had officially sold out.

Angélique Kidjo came onto the stage with the kind of energy that photographs don’t quite capture. Small in stature, dressed in colours that were impossible to ignore, with an enormous voice and a band that soon made Hodgson Hall feel like anything but a place where an audience was expected to sit quietly in its seats.

But the concert wasn’t just about rhythm and energy. Between songs, Kidjo talked to the audience. About Africa, about hope, about unity and about a very simple idea: wherever we come from, people ultimately want the same thing, a better life. Those messages weren’t separate from the music; they were part of it. Kidjo talked to the room, encouraged people to respond, sing, and join in. And the audience didn’t need much convincing.

At first, we sat.

We listened.

We applauded.

Then all sense of discipline disappeared.

People started getting to their feet. A few at first, then more and more, until an impromptu dance floor formed in front of the stage. The elegant concert hall was still the same, but the audience clearly had no intention of remaining just an audience.

Some people seemed to catch the rhythm effortlessly, relaxed, natural, their whole bodies moving with the music. The rest of us were every bit as enthusiastic and absolutely determined to join in. It’s just that enthusiasm and coordination are not always the same thing.

And nobody cared. I think that was one of the best parts of the evening. It didn’t matter who could dance, who was simply trying, or who was moving in roughly the right direction. People of different ages and backgrounds were singing and dancing together, and Kidjo had somehow turned a concert hall into a party.

At that moment, what she had said earlier about unity no longer sounded like something said from a stage. It was happening right there in front of us.

By the end of the evening, I realised that we had come to see an artist we had known very little about only a short time before, and we were leaving after singing and dancing to music from Benin in a concert hall in Georgia.

Apparently, this is part of the UGA experience too.

The opinions expressed on this blog are our own and do not reflect the official position of the Fulbright Program, the University of Georgia, or the University of Agronomic Sciences and Veterinary Medicine of Bucharest.