ABSTRACT

When Teer, once married to comedian and actor Godfrey Cambridge, decided to make Harlem the site of her company just before the dawning of the 1970s, she did so with full appreciation of the meaning of her actions. She took note of her audience, a conflicted community at war with itself, too unsure of its inherent worth to work together as one or make a firm commitment to bringing into fruition a more secure future for itself. The community had to be motivated, but in order to do that, Teer had to understand it on its own terms, find out where it was in its heart. Some Harlemites were enmeshed in abuse against themselves and their neighbors and others were asserting their pride of origin and disconnection from Western ideals, affirming their right and desire to be Other, proclaiming their prerogative not to be homogenized into the mix. The community was in a vertiginous and liminal state, poised on the edge of transition, caught equidistant between a past of enslavement to-and manipulation by-outside forces and a present yearning for more than a superficial attachment to a source, a motherland, that could sustain it in autonomy and self-expressiveness.