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I have lived in New York City since 1967. In the spring of 1983, I was listening a lot to a recording of a long piano work by Olivier Messiaen, Vingt regards sur l’enfant Jésus (Twenty Ways of Looking at Baby Jesus). In Wynnewood, outside Philadelphia, my mother, Thelma Evelyn, age 81, was dying. I began writing and drawing a dance libretto, The Re-Creation of the New World, to the Messiaen, with a central figure, the First Mother. (When I was six, in 1949, I had ballet training, but ballet was not encouraged for boys, and I quit.) Mother died on June 1.
I had been pondering the concept of the First Mother for several years. The first human mother was born half a million years ago in what we now call Africa. A likely candidate for first human mother is Lucy, Dinkinesh, whose bones were found in Ethiopia in 1974.
In the United States, African-Americans have been used and abused by the power structure. As a girl, Mother saw D. W. Griffith’s epic 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, with its climactic celebratory triumph of the Ku Klux Klan, and she sometimes confused the sweeping dramatic art of the film with truth, and alas even with good. The First Mother in The Re-Creation of the New World is thus part Dinkinesh, part Thelma, and embodies the prismatic and incalculable contradictions of the two.
Who would dance the First Mother in The Re-Creation of the New World? The Mother of Modern Dance, Martha Graham (1894-1991), is long dead. But she is present in my life. From 1937 to 1943, she lived and worked in the Greenwich Village apartment house in which since 1988 I live and work. Her company is pondering ways that The Re-Creation of the New World could be done. And I encourage other dance companies to do the same.
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