MY BODY IS NOT YOUR COUNTRY at the Cockpit Theatre

★★★

“Bonito is an intense, captivating performer”

My Body is Not Your Country is a piece that exists on the intersection between theatre and performance art. There are multi-media elements and there’s movement, song and spoken word. There are some deeply striking visuals, and phrasing. Both the poetic, lyrical monologues and the powerful physical images are, at times, both beautiful and evocative.

This one-woman show is produced and presented by Marta Bonito, in collaboration with Amanda Gatti and Laura Padilla. It explores the themes of home and belonging. It questions how to define home and weaves in different perspectives and stories of migration. Parts of it tell Bonito’s own story. But other voices, piped through into the auditorium, tell other women’s stories. Bonito switches between a microphone, and her own voice, which differentiates the stories, slightly. She brings two women on stage at the end, who are presumably the voiceovers we hear throughout. They are clearly deeply moved by the performance, and the strength of their emotion is powerful.

Bonito is an intense, captivating performer. She puts her entire heart, soul and body into it. It is wonderfully performed, and she is energetic, bold and confident in the space. There is a moment where she sprints, mostly naked, in circles around the stage, while still monologuing, which is a deeply impressive feat. She does a bit of everything, and proves herself to be well-rounded and multi-talented.

The difficulty is that the piece is trying to do too much. It’s exploring so many themes, and so many stories, that the message, and the point, are lost. The narrative is deliberately muddled, mixing multiple women’s stories, and experiences – but it has a confusing effect. The piece’s fragmentary nature tries to echo the characters’ own fragmented senses of self and identity. But it makes the piece itself hard to follow. The stories, which should be centred in this narrative, become garbled and intertwined, which lessens their power. The voiceovers are also hard to hear, perhaps adding subtitles to the screen could allow a chance for the beauty of the language to be appreciated. It’s difficult to know what to focus on. The rolling film of the beach, the gyrating performer, wrapping herself in a thin tulle scarf, or the voiceover, telling the story of a fleeing woman. It’s a shame, because some moments are stunning, but the overall effect is overcomplicated.

The lighting design is simple, if a little underused. The team opt to use a set of battery powered mini lights on stage, rather than the overhead lights, which does not seem to add much, but is a fun addition to the set.

The set works well; chairs, scarves, books and boxes are strewn about. Bonito hops over books like lily-pads, she clambers on the boxes, contorting herself through them. A microphone in the corner creates a separate section where different stories can be explored. It creates worlds, characters and stories through beautiful imagery. It is a sadness that the piece itself is not more pared down, so it could also succeed in this.