‘A victorious and rhythmically hypnotising reclamation of the body in the wake of assault’
The metal plains of Salford seem rather quiet for a Friday night, but the black box confines of the Aldridge Studio are about to be melted away. Once transported to the flowing sands of Cape Verde, Tania Camara’s ‘As I Am Naturally’ compels the audience with forty-five minutes of spoken word and dance all driven by the rhythms of Batuku, a style of performance originating from the African island nation.
‘As I Am Naturally’ is a transfixing, physically driven piece of theatre. It owes much of this focus on embodiment to its gripping yet well-handled dissection of reclaiming oneself in the violent wake of sexual trauma. What makes this utterly more tragic is Camara’s decision to focus on childhood sexual assault, an often-taboo subject in British cultural works. However, this piece does not mellow in tragedy yet resurfaces in a victorious reclamation of sexual identity.
Much of this victory owes itself to Camara’s distinct ability to accommodate the audience. She engages by rarely breaking eye contact with the audience, yet also her natural demeanour invites the audience to listen. It helps she is a professional clinical hypnotherapist, which creates a perpetually connected and fascinatingly sustained performance. The strongest moments come in times where Camara balanced paralysing silences with the multilingual, enveloping writing. Featured in the captivating section which harrowingly recalls an assault, Camara repeats, ‘I lay there still as a carcass. Rage’.
The writing is hypnotically repetitive, without becoming arduous, and creates a sensuousness which is assisted by some highly emotive lighting design from Andrew Croft. Unfortunately, this hypnotism is broken occasionally by the physical presence of a musical performer on stage with Camara. While the sound design of the piece occasionally works in tandem with the rest of the piece, with some beautifully soothing arrangements, it sometimes is a distraction from the intimate atmosphere between Camara and the audience – which I see as the piece’s strongest suit.
The other aspects of the stagecraft work to varying successes. The set is great, dominated by a ‘veve’ – a cosmogram representing Oshun, the goddess of love, fertility, and abundance. Camara constructs this at the top of the piece by sprinkling sand over the stage floor, evoking the spirit of the goddess throughout the performance. The projection works as an effective way to translate verbatim recordings of assault survivors telling their stories in Portuguese and Cape Verdean Creole, yet sometimes its use to demarcate sections with names can again be distracting.
This piece was created in association with the ‘Developed With’ programme facilitated by the Lowry and is a wonderful feature for the Manchester theatrical scene. It is community that runs through this piece and is worth seeing purely for a moment of magic in the conclusion of the show where the power of community is felt at its strongest. It is well deserving of life beyond this short run.