Lula Mebrahtu “I Am – OommoO” The Old Market, Brighton

It’s also a show of belonging and bewildering. Asserting Eritrean/Ethiopian identity as someone now clearly a Londoner – it sashays in and out of history and the life of a young woman who likes clubbing and staving off her mother’s call for “a nice (East African) boy”, with stark home truths: like dementia. Mebrahtu too is a region in Eritrea, and though we’re not told this, there’s layers of meaning and code that urgently need teasing out.

First seen at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2023, it features Mebrahtu’s by now famous MiMu gloves: they’re wireless-operated gestural MIDI controllers. You can see the blue lights flash – these are sensors that allow the operator to multi-task: visuals, lights, sound with a delirious degree of interaction. In some venues there’s been interruptions and Mebrahtu’s resorted to cheerful manual control at the desk with two monitors. Not here: it worked perfectly and with luck all future venues have been scoped for glitches.

“Home is not brick and mortar, it is a sense of belonging.” Mebrahtu’s a magnetic stage presence and even in the stark TOM space – one shorn of any props bar visuals – she fills it with a range of singing, dance gestures and narration against the ever-shifting backdrop. Mebrahtu’s voice too is a glorious mid-range soprano able to hit high-notes with a stratospheric tessitura, and this is as much sung as acted, and at least half as much danced as either. Her command of the gloves as such is absolute. And entirely original.

As narrative it begins promisingly. There’s huge images projected of a crowd of people from  Eritrea, and at one point Mebrahtu tries getting the audience to pronounce a few words in Tigrinya. This is touching and absolutely the kind of interaction Mebrahtu should aim for (it’s not the same as her most recent) and storytelling she needs to immerse us with. But with all those visuals Mebrahtu could certainly project those words onto the screen: there was some difficulty with clarity.