ABSTRACT
In early 1990, I created a site-specific work, Had Me Somebody But I Lost Her Very Young, for my dance/theater company REALITY at Los Angeles’s Bradbury Building. Commissioned by Elise Bernhardt, then director of the New Yorkbased presenting organization Dancing in the Streets, the piece was part of “The Creole Series,” a collection of eight full-length works that juxtaposed the true-life, early-1900s bayou stories of my Creole grandparents with my own stories from contemporary urban America. During the development process, Elise brought Joseph V. Melillo, then director of the New York International Theater Festival, to a rehearsal. After the run-through, they reiterated a comment I’d heard over and over since presenting my first evening-length piece in 1989: “Your work is wonderful, but you should consider working in film.” Although I knew little about filmmaking, I intuitively agreed that the layered composition, narrative base, time-jumping framework, and intimate gestural vocabulary of my dances seemed to cry out for film. I had a secret desire to explore the medium, but in my mind there was absolutely no chance of doing so: the costs were staggering, my work was too “alternative,” and my company was much too young.
