Some Experiences Leave Us Changed Forever

By Lynn Williams / contributor

          In a remote mountain-top village in Ghana, West Africa a beautiful Ghanaian woman named Nana Asuo Yaw sits at a small wooden table laid out with sundry objects: Fanta bottles, perfumes, cowrie shells.  She is calm and quiet.  Suddenly, she lurches, hiccups and shakes as if she is having a seizure.  When her eyes open, Nana Asuo Yaw is gone.   Her gentle, soothing voice is replaced by the gruff, throaty speech of a male spirit named Tigare.  He smokes a pipe, insults everyone in the room and tells vivid stories of witch hunting before he finally decides to go, leaving Nana as dramatically as he entered.  When she comes back, exhausted, she doesn’t remember a thing.

            This is an average day for Nana Asuo Yaw, one of the character’s you will meet in the East Coast premiere of Second Sight, a solo performance by San Francisco and NYC-based performer Lea Bender and presented by this year’s Philly Fringe Festival.  Second Sight is the incredible true story of an American woman’s experiences living with spirit mediums in Ghana.  Through live-performance and story-telling combined with images, video and soundscape from the real-life events, Bender draws audiences into a vivid journey of belief, mysticism and the unknown.

            A Pennsylvania native, Bender made her first trip to Ghana in 1997 as a college exchange student on an Arts and Culture program through the School for International Training.  As part of an independent study on traditional African religious practices, Bender went to live with Nana Asuo Yaw in her small village.

“Nana would become possessed by spirits who would help the sick to be healed.”  Bender admits, “My intention was to study the placebo effect of these healings…until I started participating in the possession rituals myself.”  Some personal experiences, which Bender re-lives in the show, turned her from skeptic to believer and opened up a world of questions.  The experiences haunted her for eight years until January of 2005, when she went back “to get some answers.”  Bender returned home in April with true stories that rival fiction.

Craig Moore. Copyright 2005.