Its practically impossible to put Lenelle Mose, a Haitian-American performance artist hailing from Northampton, Mass., into a category. Her website reads poet, performance artist, playwright, but when one watches a performance, the words storyteller and activist and even revolutionary also come to mind.
Moses interactive one-woman play Womb-Words, Thirsting, which she will perform at Northwestern University on Feb. 19 and 20, is similarly multilayered, blending spoken word, song, storytelling, Vodou jazz and queer theory hip-hop. Its also an intoxicating call to actiona plea to reconsider issues of gender, race, class, sexuality and transnational identity.
Mose started working on the play in 2004, the year she graduated from Smith College with an MFA in playwriting.
Suddenly I was an adult with bills to pay and a public identity as a feminist, queer activist and artist, Mose said. Just eight years earlier, I had been a Seventh-Day Adventist whose parents thought she was shy and heterosexual. I wanted to compose a narrative that made sense of the changes I had gone through. I wanted to track my own politicization, document the moments of awakening.
Mose said the play was developed partly as a reaction to former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristides second ousting from Haiti, which also happened in 2004.
I wanted to talk about being a hyphenated American, an outsider, an immigrant, a witness, she said.
Mose is just 30 years old, but already has had her work commissioned by numerous theater companies and has pieces in a handful of anthologies. She has performed at dozens of colleges and universities across the country.
Talking about race, class, gender, sexuality and culture can be a lot of fun, Mose said. I hope studentswalk out of my performances feeling empowered to have difficult conversations with respect, compassion and humor.
Mose has always known she wanted to be a theater artist and writer.
I am lucky, she said. I had access to strong arts programming in public schools. In high school, every Spring, company members from Alvin Ailey would come to lead us in master classes. I remember being 14 and worrying aloud to my theatre teacher How can I be an actress? My parents are broke. I cant afford to be a starving artist. He simply growled at me, Youll never be a starving artist, Lenelle. You want it too much.
Although Moses highly politicized work contrasts sharply with her upbringing, she says her family is learning to appreciate her headstrong personality.
I have never apologized for being an artist or a woman who loves women and dares to talks about it, she said. My folks saw [the show] for the first time last fall, at the Theatre Offensive in Boston. The man who introduced me was in partial drag, wearing huge rhinestone earrings. My father said, I would never have walked into this theatre on my own. He’s very conservative, a patriarch.
Mose added, He also said, Im proud of you.
Lately, Moses connection to Haiti has intensified as she struggles to comprehend the recent earthquakes destruction.
I cant yet describe what it is like to see images of Port-au-Prince in ruins, she said. The hospital of my birth, all rubble. People who look like me, amputated. My paternal grandparents made it through the earthquake intact, thank goodness. But family members on my mothers side are still unaccounted for.
Mose has been reaching out to other Haitian artists and writing about the earthquake to process what has happened, but she doesnt see this as much of a departure.
I’ve been writing about Haiti and Haitian-American identity since the beginning of my career and I will continue, she said. Whether it makes the evening news or not, I will be talking about Haiti.
Mose will perform Womb-Words, Thirsting at 8 p.m. Feb. 19 and 20 at Northwestern University, Annie May Swift Hall, 1920 Campus Drive, Evanston.
–by Nona Willis Aronowitz, TribLocal.com reporter
