Portfolio > The Body Remembers

Heather Agyepong’s powerful new solo performance The Body Remembers explores how trauma lives in the body, particularly for Black British women across different generations. Through a unique and compelling relationship between the audience and artist, it creates a collective cathartic experience.

Created & performed by multidisciplinary artist & actor Heather Agyepong, The Body Remembers features interviews of Black British women in trauma recovery. The performance is inspired by the therapeutic practice of Authentic Movement with Agyepong as The Mover and the audience as The Witness. Featuring dynamic projections and an immersive soundscape which help the audience to re-discover the power of self-reflection as the start of recovery and healing.

Co-created by Imogen Knight (movement) and Gail Babb (dramaturgy), The Body Remembers creates a space for the audience and artist to attend to themselves and each other.

Accompanying visuals focus tightly on different areas of her body, and the lighting creates bold shadows that reach a dramatic climax when, at the end of the performance, Agyepong stands and meets the audience’s gaze, her shadow cast among several others recorded on video, emphasizing that the trauma she’s responding to is a collective one.

  • Evening Standard

Again, we are confronted by Gillian Tan’s arresting images, this time an image of Agyepong’s silhouetted figure in a circle, like she is moving within the barrel of a gun, or cleansing herself in the light of the moon.

  • www.afridiziak.com

credits

Created and performed by Heather Agyepong
Dramaturg and Co-Creator Gail Babb
Movement Director and Co-Creator Imogen Knight
Video Designer Gillian Tan
Sound Designer Donato Wharton
Associate Sound Designer Raffaela Pancucci
Stage Managers Tanya Stephenson and Stella Kailides
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist Dawn Estefan

photography credits

Myah Jeffers

Joseph Lynn