For 10 days leading up to the watch party, each day I am sharing highlights from the creative process.

The HOME section: 3/10

The HOME section is the first thing I started creating, and it really was a process of DISCOVERY more than creation. As an Artist-in-Residence with Art On Purpose (dir. Jamie Philbert) at East Yard (dir. Kevon Foderingham) in Arima, Trinidad I worked out of Art On Purpose’s dance studio for almost 4 weeks in the September of 2017. I knew the purpose of the project—what I wanted to help resolve or research—to claim my relationship to family, history, culture, legacy, gifts, and story. I did not know how I would do this; but I figured the best place to start was with my own Mother.

Excerpts from my interviews with my Mother guide the sound score in the first section of “Yam, Potatoe an Fish!” I took notes and then focused on the words that were most resonant for me. (See an example in the picture below. These type of posters were taped to the walls)

Many surprising things occurred. Not only did I gain insight into some of the early forces that have shaped who Lorna is in listening to her story of migration; but in dealing with my Mother’s words, I found a story that paralleled mine. It was healing, refreshing and affirming. LANGUAGE was a major theme as a conduit for cultural retention, and vis a vis, cultural loss. LANGUAGE was the holder of memory. You will hear as you watch the piece, my mother recount the exact moment when she lost her tongue and became an “American.” She says, “If I go back home I am not really part of that anymore.”

The impetus for this research came from an existential homelessness I was experiencing in living in Minnesota. In the Fall of 2017 I had left a dance company I had spent my entire career with and that felt like a family. I had been investing a lot of my time and energy into cultivating educational programs for youth in *white spaces. I felt no connection to the culturally saturated community of East Flatbush, Brooklyn that raised me and that I had left 14 years ago (if you count my Juilliard days). My only connection to the Caribbean was through my parents, and it felt locked in time. It felt wrapped up in their life experiences but not mine. I had no contemporary context for my existence as a person in the Caribbean Diaspora. “

What of Tobago and Grenada will I pass down to my kids?”

This question plagued me.