A close up of Camara's face while lying down, her hand over her shoulder

Tania Camara:
As I Am Naturally

Tania Camara, As I Am Naturally at Lowry, 26 – 27 September 2024. Photograph by Tamsin Drury.

As we enter Lowry’s Aldridge Studio for the performance of As I Am Naturally by Tania Camara, the song Brinka Cumi by Batuko Tabanka, a female Cape Verdean singing group, plays through speakers and fills the space. Although the stage is empty, a group of Black women already sits at the back of the auditorium, filling about two rows of seats. They wear white tops with flashes of African print. Having first become aware of Tania Camara’s work in early 2020 with her performance of Oreo (which I watched online through Word of Warning’s YouTube channel), I had assumed that this show might also be a solo performance. Excitedly, I wonder what the women’s part in the show will be. A choir? Musicians? Dancers? Fellow storytellers?

A few red stools are laid out at the back of the stage, and small black bags that look like they might be weighted are arranged on the floor near them. When Camara enters, her costume is simple: a long flowing orange skirt, a white top, bare feet. She wears her natural afro hair out instead of the blonde braids shown in the promo pictures for the show. The costume feels modest and reminds me of my aunties back home in Zimbabwe. She gestures towards the audience with closed fists, speaking first in Portuguese then in English, asking us to look at her hands. She begins sprinkling, and then spreading what looks like salt, but I later learn is semolina, on the floor. While it’s difficult to see clearly from our seats, the programme tells us that this opening ritual is the drawing of a ‘vêvê, a symbol of the Yoruba goddess of love, fertility, and abundance, Oshun. It is a heart shape with a line going through it, with stars at the top and inside. While she works, recorded voices invite the viewers to ‘breathe in and out’, in an act of grounding to make us feel ‘safe and secure’. These intentional breaths to regulate the nervous system are repeated throughout the show, which I interpret as deliberate acts of care from the show’s creators. As we learn from the programme notes, Camara is also a practicing hypnotherapist, and the ten grounding steps the unidentified voices talk the audience through are clearly drawn from those processes.

Throughout this ritual Camara hums a soothing tune. She doesn’t speak and doesn’t verbally tell us the symbolism of the salt, semolina or shape. But it makes me think about how, in some African spiritual practices, salt is used in rituals to ward off evil spirits, to prevent negative energies from entering the home, and salt can also be used to cleanse and purify. For example, steaming with hot salt water is something I’ve been doing since I was a child during difficult times, passed on from my family to purify oneself from negative energies. The programme had also noted that the show’s themes involve child sexual assault, which explains to me the need to ward off evil spirits if Camara is about to delve into her trauma, so I do as I’m told and I breathe. In and out.

Camara crouched centre stage mid-speech, her right hand a blur of movement, left on the floor amid the white powder she's spread around
Tania Camara, As I Am Naturally at Lowry, 26 – 27 September 2024. Photograph by Tamsin Drury.

Throughout all of this the word INDUCTION has been projected onto the back wall of the stage in white capital letters. Now it changes and the word MUSICA flashes up. The whole show is split up like this into nine categories whose titles are always present on the back wall of the stage. I become aware now of the kora at the back of the stage accompanying Camara – John Haycock has been playing this whole time. Sometimes soothingly, but now harder. Camara dances in a manner that feels agitated at first, stamping her feet erratically, then becomes a playful, childlike dance through the salt, breaking the shape she has created. We hear a child’s laughter repeatedly bursting out over the speakers as she moves. Still, she doesn’t tell us what she is doing or what her material is, and I wonder if perhaps she shares the superstition I have about sacred methods of healing, passed down by our ancestors, not quite belonging in stage performances. The way Camara sprinkled it across the floor and now stomps all over it feels like the beginning of a cleansing. To begin with destruction feels intentional, like the rest of the show might be an attempt to rebuild an innocence that was unwillingly taken away.

Indeed, in CHILD she tells us about her childhood in Lisbon, Portugal. The show’s autobiographical tale is told to the audience plainly – Camara stops dancing and speaks directly to the audience, holding eye contact. ‘I remember music, musica. Telling stories around the fire, stories of men, of caged birds wishing to be free. Stories of before, where being scared of the dark was the worst thing that could happen.’ It feels joyful and carefree. BIKE begins similarly playfully, recounting how learning to ride a bike is like riding a bike: ‘My auntie kept falling off, but I just knew how to do it.’ But suddenly the playful mood switches as the question of safety first rears its head. Camara recounts a memory in which she’s cycled too far from home and won’t make it back before dark descends. The rhythms of her speech pick up in pace as she’s quickly pedalling the bike in the depths of night trying to get home: ‘I pedalled faster and faster, holding on for dear life. I knew I would be in trouble but I didn’t want to be in trouble, I wanted to be safe.’

From here on there is a dark undertone to the show, something unsaid or possibly not yet experienced – a looming danger. In SNAKE we hear a story about when Camara and her brother see a snake and chase it, trying to trap it in a box. She describes this box as ‘like a mouth’, sinisterly, but while recounting the story scampers playfully across the full space of the stage, visibly chasing and recoiling from the snake in her memory. Throughout all this, an older boy watches and laughs. ‘I could feel his eyes on me’, she says.

ROOM/CHAIR is the show’s emotional climax. Camara doesn’t tell us exactly what happened to her, but we’re told where she was when it happened: in her grandma’s house, where the older boy also lived. She was left alone with him. He tells her to lie down while they ‘play a game’.  The musica stops. She tells us, ‘I stop breathing. I don’t remember what happened’, and there is an extended moment of silence for her lost memory as she stands looking at the audience. She tells us she remembers finding her friend outside playing with marbles and remembers sitting on a red chair. She crosses the stage and uncomfortably perches on one of the stools. It is agonising to witness, the way she carries the physical aftermath in her body. Then her voice echoes across the room as she lays on the floor: ‘I lay there still as a carcass/rock/lost puppy. RAGE.’

All of a sudden she picks herself back up and insists, ‘you consuming me, this is not my story. I am more’. The musica returns. Camara makes her body a drum, rhythmically hitting her chest and legs. This is GATHERING. Over the speakers, recorded voices of women with various accents tell of being survivors of sexual assault. One woman, who sounds American, says that ‘even though my mind doesn’t remember, my body does’. Some women speak in Portuguese. They tell us the ages they were when they were harmed: two years old, four, turning five. Camara stomps across the stage, creating fast and panicked rhythmic drumming that sounds like a heartbeat as the women tell their stories. Then, a man begins to sing, then tells us, ‘it was hard to say out loud’. As he tells his survival story, Camara reminds us to breathe in and out, cradling her arms as if holding a child, telling it, ‘it’s not you, it’s not us’, in an attempt to comfort.

Camara with her right hand raised, paml towards the audience and fingers spread, beside the constructed tree trunk with two branches emerging
Tania Camara, As I Am Naturally at Lowry, 26 – 27 September 2024. Photograph by Tamsin Drury.

It’s during TREE where the trauma becomes visualised, and this section feels most potent to me. When Camara plants a branch of a tree in a trunk at the centre of the stage, the women who were already in the space before us emerge slowly from the back of the seating to form a protective semicircle around her. They each carry a branch, a symbol of their own or another’s trauma, to add to the tree. This group adding branches to the tree, as well as the use of voiceover throughout the show, tells us that this is not just Camara’s story, but that she is sharing her experiences to raise awareness for others who may be suffering or silenced. Camara addresses the audience to explain that the purpose of this show is an act of defiance against ‘a want to protect the abuser’.

The word on the back wall changes to COMMUNITY and Camara explains to us that trauma can be laid out in the Batuku space. Batuku is the music and dance that comes from Cape Verde (a Portuguese colony until 1975), its historical roots in slavery and colonialism. Original Batuku songs are said to reference struggles for freedom from forced labour. It is a space for women, by women, Camara tells us. It is music, dance, spoken word. As I Am Naturally is, I realise, Batuku. ‘Batuku is a heartbeat. A space to talk about losing a child, abuse, sexual behaviours. It is life’. Camara and the women, a group called Creolas de Salford, give us an idea what Batuku looks and feels like as the show comes to a close. The women form a semicircle around her and begin using the weighted cloth bags to make drumbeats. As they sing together, Camara stomps and recites spoken word in the middle, as is tradition, bringing us to the end with a call and response song in Portuguese.

I feel the women’s loud drumbeats all the way into my soul. Their singing makes me smile and I want to get up and dance the demons away but everyone in the audience is sitting quietly and politely, so I do too. It might be inappropriate for outsiders to react. There is raucous applause and a standing ovation at the end of the work. I feel soft and teary, but extremely impressed with the ways my nervous system has attempted to find methods to regulate throughout the show – having sat weeping like an infant in many very triggering shows that did little to help the audience to or remind us to regulate. In Camara’s work, healing isn’t centred around Western narratives of therapy and medication. As I Am Naturally instead offers a Cape Verdean ritual as an alternative, a somatic and cultural method of processing trauma – through singing, dancing, drumming and taking part in women’s talking circles where they share their struggles amongst community, where ‘a cry becomes a laugh and a laugh becomes a song’.

From coming into the space and being welcomed by a song by Batuko Tabanka, to the first words we hear spoken aloud being Portuguese, this feels like a piece of performance that is very much not centred around a traditional English style of storytelling. The categorisation of moments in life and memories makes me think of how trauma, particularly when experienced as a child, affects our memories and our abilities to see life in a linear journey. I think back to Camara’s costume for this piece reminding me of my aunties, and how much of a grown-up outfit it is. In a show about childhood experiences and healing the inner child, the costume alone shows us that she could not tell this story until long after what she went through and discovered the best medium to tell it.

As I Am Naturally by Tania Camara showed at Lowry, 26 – 27 September 2024. It was part of Lowry’s ‘Developed With 2022-2024’ programme.

mandla is a writer, facilitator and producer based in Manchester.

This article is supported by Lowry.

Published 18.12.2024 by Jazmine Linklater in Reviews

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