Nigeria: “Je vais bien” – Celine Dion stuns 30,000 fans as she completes first full concert in 6 years
By Zuleihat Owuiye, Nigeria
NANTERRE, France — She hit the high F, held it, then blew out a breath and turned to look back at the band — a quick, disbelieving glance toward her musical director. Some 30,000 people read it before they had finished screaming: Celine Dion did it.
It was “All By Myself,” the song the Quebec superstar’s voice has been measured against since 1996, saved for the encore of her first full concert in more than six years — her first since stiff person syndrome, a rare, progressive neurological disease, attacked her muscles, including those of the throat.
On Saturday night, September 13, 2026, at the Plenitude Arena in Nanterre, west of Paris, Celine Dion returned. Not for a cameo. Not for four minutes on the Eiffel Tower. For a full show
Celine Dion, 58, had not played a full concert since March 8, 2020. In 2022, she revealed her diagnosis: stiff person syndrome (SPS), a disease that affects only one or two people in a million. It stiffens muscles and sets off spasms violent enough to break bones, triggered by loud noise, by touch, by emotional stress. An arena holding 30,000 people is all three at once.
“Touring can be very difficult even when you’re 100%,” she said in a statement in 2023 when she canceled the last dates of her world tour.
Singing with it, she told NBC in 2024, felt like being strangled. The disease attacks the larynx, the very instrument that sold 250 million records.
Few doubted she could still sing a song. What nobody knew was whether she could get through a whole show, and then get up and do it again a few nights later.
Saturday night was the answer: 25 songs in 2 hours and 15 minutes. The first night of a punishing Paris residency — 16 shows in five weeks, with 10 more booked for May 2027, 26 nights in all before tens of thousands of people each time.
The last time France saw her sing, it lasted four minutes. At the Olympic opening ceremony in July 2024, Dion sang Edith Piaf’s “Hymne à l’amour” from the Eiffel Tower — one song, one night — and the world called it a resurrection. On Saturday, she had to do it 25 times, then get up and do it again Wednesday.
She cried before she finished the first song. In a custom Dior gown and a Boucheron diamond necklace, she pressed her hands together in prayer, then missed her cue in “On ne change pas,” on the line about the skinny little girl from Charlemagne, Quebec.
The crowd answered by chanting the riff from “Seven Nation Army” — the same chant that shook the Stade de France during sporting events, now for her.
Dion told them she had learned to live with the fragility and made it her reason to keep going. Then she sang for another two hours.
The voice has changed. It is not the effortless instrument of the 90s that could float through three octaves without a breath. It has lost some of its top. Every big note is now a decision she makes in front of 30,000 people, a physical negotiation with her own body.
She sang “My Heart Will Go On” as the arena lit up with phone lights. She belted “The Power of Love” with the 18-voice gospel choir in white robes that joined her for the second act. And then, in a moment of pure defiance, she sang Catalani’s “Ebben? Ne andrò lontana” — Maria Callas’ signature aria — in pink feathers while fake snow fell from the ceiling. Her disease attacks the larynx. She went for opera anyway.
Set designer Willo Perron placed her among gray megaliths, a pop Stonehenge, both ancient and futuristic. Michelle Obama watched from the seats. Outside, fans wore sashes reading “Celine Dion 2026,” like beauty pageant winners, and T-shirts from the LVMH house that shares her first name.
“When she hit that note, I grabbed my friend’s arm. I’d been holding my breath without realizing. Then I started crying. ‘She’s back. She’s really back,'” said Élodie Marchand, 42, a primary schoolteacher from Nantes who was in the front row.
“My daughter kept saying, ‘Mum, we can’t go all the way to Paris for Celine,'” said Isabelle Gagnon, 52, a teacher from Montreal. “Tonight my daughter was singing beside me, and I thought: you see? This is why we came.”
“In Montreal, you grow up knowing those songs whether you mean to or not,” said Antoine Beaulieu, 31, a graphic designer from Quebec. “I used to pretend I was too cool for Celine. Tonight I knew every word, so clearly that was a lie.”
Camille Morel, 38, a pharmacist from Lyon, put her phone away midway. “I wanted to actually be there,” she said. “My voice is completely gone. I’m supposed to be working tomorrow — good luck to them.”
Then came the encore, and the note everyone was waiting for. The last “anymore” in “All By Myself” a cappella, the note bent upward, held, the orchestra surging in beneath her. She fanned herself afterward, laughing at her own relief.
She looked at the crowd and gave them three words in French: “Je vais bien.” I’m doing fine.
She closed with two Jean-Jacques Goldman standards — “Pour que tu m’aimes encore” and “J’irai où tu iras” — and a last line to the room: “I love you, my loves. Take care of yourselves.”
And on night one in Nanterre, she proved she can still do it — not perfectly, not like before, but bravely, honestly, and with a voice that still makes 30,000 people hold their breath for one high.
