ABSTRACT
I started New WORLD Theater when I was 23 years old; in many ways I grew up in it. I raised my children, Chinua and Mikiko, in the theater and grew a community around it-it was the world that I wanted for them, for us to live in. New WORLD Theater was a thirty-year experiment in cultural organizing, social paradigm shifting, and artistic questioning. I had the privilege of working with artists across a span of generations-from sages who have gone to dance with the ancestors like James Baldwin, Horace Clarence Boyer, Alice Childress, Gordon Heath, Errol Hill, Pearl Primus, Barney Simon, and Sekou Sundiata, to artists who have revitalized American theater and arts today, such as Jorge Cortiñas, Danny Hoch, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Nobuko Miyamoto, Dipankar Mukherjee, lê thi diem thúy, Carl Hancock Rux, Mildred Ruiz and Steve Sapp and UNIVERSES, and so many others. I remember my toddler son playing with “Uncle Jimmy,” my daughter being hoisted onto the back of a dancer during rehearsal with Pearl, Carl writing a poem about the two of them when they were teens, my daughter babysitting Steve and Mildred’s son Kwest, and both of them performing in Project 2050 as they came of age. The story of New WORLD is the story of a community family farm that raised not just me and my children, but flourished under the labor of, and provided sustenance for, so many others-artists, students, organizers, administrators, educators, and our larger community. As its founder, I offer these reflections as a way of understanding the ethos of New WORLD Theater. What were NWT’s overarching principles over the years? The eleven precepts below are neither prescriptive nor complete, but are considerations of revelatory moments and points of consistency through the decades I led the theater. I offer these stories about the past as ways to think about creating the future.
