Under the Radar Review: Ian Kamau Brings His Multimedia Memoir, Loss, to Harlem

As Ian Kamau takes his seat behind a microphone in the middle of the Apollo’s Victoria Theater, wearing a closed-collar shirt and red skullcap, a hush comes over the audience. There’s a gravitas about him, but he softens it with a reserved, almost diffident, “Hi, how you doing?” He’s going to tell us some stories, he says, if that’s OK with us.

It’s obvious from the moment you enter that Kamau will be doing more than just telling us stories in his show Loss, running through Saturday as a part of this year’s Under the Radar festival. There’s a grand piano, a saxophone, a guitar, and two screens on opposite sides of the theater. In a tapestry of words, sounds, and images, he’s going to let us experience them.

And what an experience. Kamau, a poet and musician from Toronto, is the son of Trinidadian filmmakers Claire Prieto and Roger McTair (who is credited as a co-writer). The couple moved to Canada in 1970, and we learn about both of them during Kamau’s show, which unfolds like a mysterious, shapeshifting dream over the course of about 100 minutes (Aislinn Rose is the dramaturg and rehearsal director). Incorporating his own rich poetry with that of his father’s, Kamau guides us through momentous and mundane events in his family history and explores the isolation and sadness that come from leaving people and places behind.

Kamau is fascinated with the origins of things, including the Greek and Latin roots of words, making Loss feel at times like an epic poem in miniature. Once told by his girlfriend that he speaks in a monotone (“measured tone” is more accurate), Kamau looks at his father’s life in Trinidad and the family he left behind before crossing the oceans, starting his own family in Toronto, and becoming a preeminent documentarian. Overshadowing Kamau’s exploration of the past is the separation of his parents, the death of his father last year, and the mystery surrounding his father’s mother, Nora Elutha Rogers, who one day suddenly stopped eating. “Those who need healing can’t see who they hurt,” he says.

Through this loose cloth of memories, composer and pianist Bruce A. Russell weaves haunting, jazz-inflected music as though he’s translating Kamau’s words into notes. Russell is accompanied by Dennis Passley on tenor saxophone and Dyheim Stewart on guitar. The music blends seamlessly with images of a beach in Trinidad (Tiffany Hsiung filmed footage for Jeremy Mimnagh’s video design) as waves crash on the shore (David Mesiha and David Heeney provide crystal-clear sound). Shawn Henry’s emotional lighting adds to the fine-tuned orchestral nature of this piece, with Kamau presiding like an unassuming conductor over it all.

Contrary to its title, Loss is not about looking back in sadness, and I couldn’t help feeling instead that the show more than anything else is a retrieval. Despite its specificity to his own life, I found myself revisiting my own memories as I watched his interview with his mother and listened to her talk movingly about the hibiscus that grew around her home in Trinidad. Loss shows us that looking back, as much as it can hurt, can also heal.