Lamesha Ruddock
A vulnerable, true, and generous storytelling experience cathartically releasing trauma through wit, sorrow and reclamation.
After a lifetime of yearning for Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside, Tabatha finally hops across the pond to see the band live in London. What is supposed to be a soothing of her inner child ends up jarringly vindicating her mother’s warnings of solo travelling.
How Do I Hold It? asks the question thusly. How do you persist when embodied trauma overrides your dreams, hopes and confuses your joy to enter a state of fight, flight or freeze?
Myers reels you into her world with effortless storytelling. This is a story that welcomes entertainment with humour, and one that drops in shock and dread as we see the patterns of exploitation approaching. She easily brings us into the world of religious solace and trauma, the concept of families acting in your best interest yet not filling the hole left by abandonment, and a sense of your body being wrong in trying to shake natural sexual desires.
How Do I Hold It? carefully addresses themes of sexual abuse that keeps Tabatha and her resilience at the centre.
There are some unfortunate guarantees in this life when you grow up sheltered and told a different version of events from reality. It unsettles your whole being and leaves you deeply defenceless to this cruel world. Despite this reckoning with life, Tabatha finds hope in creativity and particularly Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, inspiring her to steward her light and voice to share with others, breaking generational curses of silence.
The lighting design weaves the story together beautifully. The warm wash of the Pentecostal church shows the comfort of the community Tabatha had as a child, to the deep saturated red showing the impending doom she felt leering over her. Then to the light purples of potential when she is discovering London through rose tinted glasses, an finally to the bitter flashing lights accompanied by a gnawing drone.
Mayers is an absolute pleasure to witness onstage. She oscillates earnestly from pure joy to playfulness to deep confusion, subtly absorbing her new reality. You cannot help but feel rage at how her safe space has been intruded, phantom hands that continue to collapse her even as she tries to move forward.
How Do I Hold It? is a deeply introspective show allowing us to recognise our daily celebration of resilience and care onto others, and ourselves, when the worst has happened. How do you hold yourself and how do you continue to hold others? Ultimately, through generous storytelling and a refusal to be silenced.
Real. Clever. Reclamatory. How Do I Hold It? must be heard.
Recommended Drink: A nice soothing peppermint tea.
You can catch How Do I Hold It? at Greenside @ George Street from August 18-22 at 11:40 (50mins). Tickets are available through the EdFringe Online Box Office.
Jessica Lia Berry
