EdFringe Review: OommoO

As an experience, ‘OommoO’, stands alone. Created, and performed by Lula Mebrahtu, aka Oram award-winning musician LULA.XYZ, it defies easy classification. Nominally a piece of theatre, ‘OommoO’ doesn’t so much tell a story, as expose the audience to a collage of music, information, dance, and conjured atmosphere. It’s like…a dream, that world on the edge of waking which is both of the world, and apart from it.

Mebrahtu is a captivating host for the hour, a fey presence equipped with a glowing smile, and a lexicon of body language translated into a complex, evolving soundscape thanks to her Mi.Mu Gloves. In OommoO she conducts a multi-media symphony complete with projected imagery, exploring the interface of cultures experienced by immigrants and displaced communities. The show is explicitly based on another’s experience, where Habesha(Eritrean/Ethiopian) meets British, with the added burden of facing memory loss in an ageing loved on.

Much of OommOO is really only understood in retrospect: Lula dancing trance-like whilst scenes of Habesha culture flash past on the screen behind; the song she builds in layers, part lament, part anthem; the testimony to dementia and the pain inflicted on loved ones left behind. That something is trying to be said is clear, that a medium to communicate a deep truth is being invoked, but the whole is just too abstract to push home a clear message.

However, you do have respect such a bold attempt to communicate feeling to an audience, not to stir feelings, but to bathe another in the interior world of the creator. There’s much to suggest this could be the beginning of a creative process from which something greater will emerge, not least Mebrahtu’s outstanding dexterity with, and use of, technology, and her easy connection making with her watchers.

However, if OommoO isn’t perfect, it is at least one of the most original experiences on offer at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe. It would be unsurprising to find people talking fondly in years to come on how lucky they were to see OommoO, before Lula Mebrahtu took to the stratosphere.