Stepping into Livia Kojo Alour’s dreamy solo show Black Sheep is a bit like being in someone's mind. Not vague but impressionistic, Alour’s priority seems to be taking the audience into the emotions of memories rather than the logistical details.

Slowly the details coalesce. Growing up, years of ignorance and insults about Alour’s natural hair - and not just from other children - have left her with deep wells of doubt and self-loathing. As a lonely girl in Berlin, frequently exoticized for both her blackness and her queerness, she finds the second she subverts others' expectations, they abandon her. As she gets older she also finds herself objectified and deprioritized by the men she dates, which is expressed in a mesmerizing spoken word piece cadenced by a menacing drumbeat that becomes increasingly vicious as it goes on.

Alour moved to London ten years ago in the hopes of finding a more diverse and accepting community and was again confronted with an insidious fog of institutional racism. Through her career as a professional sword swallower, she enthralled audiences night after night, but ultimately, it began to feel like a hollow attempt at earning love. The sword swallowing is a motif throughout, with references to things being ‘cutthroat’ and ‘hard to swallow’, and on a more meta level, in the show’s explorations of the thankless virtues of endurance and resilience, so often foisted on women, particularly Black women. Prior to the show, I wondered if it would include demonstrations of this skill, but in context, the fact that it doesn’t feels right: like the absence of it is a defiant refusal to pander.

This is something of a solo variety show, with sections of spoken word, physical theatre (the show opens with Alour putting her arm through the sleeve of her absent mother’s coat and letting the hand caress her cheek like that of a child), a burlesque routine with huge feathered fans, monologuing, and a range of songs - innovative covers of ‘I Put a Spell on You’ and ‘Wicked Game’ - showcasing Alour’s skyscraper of a voice, woven throughout. There’s a section where Alour pulls taped affirmations off her body, each describing a different aspect of the love she has for herself. This might have felt corny or trite in another show, but here it underpinned the core message of the piece: no amount of love or acceptance from others will ever be enough if it comes at the cost of self-abandonment.

There are multiple costume changes, though Alour never leaves the stage, and the piece ends with her in stilettos and a pantsuit which wouldn’t look out of place delivering a TED Talk. In this wide-ranging, kaleidoscopic show it feels as though she is gathering and embodying all these versions of womanhood, and giving them each a place at her table.

This is a profound, deeply beguiling self-portrait of empowerment that pulses with anger and beauty. Highly recommended.