Four Women

The dancer Linda Martina Young embodies the four female figures of Nina Simone’s ballad “Four Women”, from “Aunt Sarah” the slave to the angry “Peaches”. The staging of the dance and the reference to African music reveals a critique of stereotypes. “I’m awfully bitter these days, because my parents were slaves.”Born in New York, the filmmaker, writer and teacher Julie Dash made The Diary of an African Nun and Illusions during her time at ULCA; for television, she has made Incognito (1999), Funny Valentine (1999) and The Rosa Parks Story (2002). Her feature Daughters of the Dust (1991) was the first film by an African-American woman to be theatrically released in the United States.