Artist and writer Emma Sporton shares her experience and reflections on The Disappearing Act by Yinka Esi Graves, which showed at Lakeside Arts on Thursday 9 October 2025.

La Lala is a captivating presence, and we meet her concealed in shadow. Every move she makes is showmanship. We are her audience, and we see what she wants us to see. But it’s difficult to know whether we are under her power, or if she is under ours. We fall into her push and pull of fitting in and standing out, and as the audience, our role is fixed.

As La Lala moves, she traces the shapes that live in her body, and settles into them, letting them fill the space she resides in. Even facing away from us in stillness, nothing else happening on stage, Lala is everything. When the drums infiltrate this active stillness, they are overwhelming. The stillness loud, and yet this sudden music even louder.

As the piece grows and the elements of rhythm, music, language, costume, speech, song, video, drawing, and movement begin to interact with each other, overlapping and distorting, the audience begin to see Lala as a whole. One person can be many things, and yet we may only see what we want to see, what we can understand. You get the sense that she is everything on stage and yet hiding behind this accumulation of herself. Everything on stage is her so why should the audience even look her way?

Language, through speech and song, helped frame the work. When Lala stepped up to the microphone, she was a curator for the audience’s gaze. When she was dancing, she was the art. When drawing, or painting her face, she was the artist. Always, she was changing, in a state of constant ‘metamorphosis’, seen entirely as intended. During the section where she painted her face with concealer, she was: the singer who in Spanish is trying to understand her own identity; herself putting makeup on and giving a tutorial in French on concealer and the art of concealing; the person who in English is trying to put the history of the colonisation of Ghana into words. All this becomes one noise, sentences tangled up in one another, meanings lost while each layer fights for attention.

Every detail is essential in the make up of this character, this performer, and yet always, she directs our attention to the next shiny thing on stage while she is present and existing in real life as fully herself, her body raw, open and alive. The audience glue their eyes instead to a zoomed in projection of Lala’s face, or to the bird’s eye view of the markings she creates on the floor, our minds rushing to find meanings in the incomprehensible tracings of a whole person existing fully and passionately in the space right before us. Yes, Miss Lala is circles, zigzags, and scattered fragments of chalk, but she also continues to exist beyond the markings she leaves behind. She is always the person exhausting herself to both be seen and to control how she is seen.