When the august Senegalese choreographer and dancer Germaine Acogny was born, on Pentecost in 1944, a dove appeared on the windowsill. “Mother has returned,” people said, implying that the girl was the reincarnation of her father’s mother, a Yoruban priestess. There was much the girl seemed set to inherit, including her grandmother’s ceremonial knives.

Fast forward several decades, when Ms. Acogny knocked on her father’s door in Paris. When he asked, “Who is it? ” she answered, “Your mother.” What had she come for? The knives.

These are two of the stories that Ms. Acogny tells in her elegantly intense autobiographical solo “Somewhere at the Beginning,” which had its American premiere at La MaMa on Thursday as part of the Crossing the Line festival. “I will not kill you, father,” she says. While the show isn’t a patricide, it is an argument with the patriarch — and with patriarchy and colonialism — simmering with murderous rage.

In this production — smartly directed by Mikaël Serre — Ms. Acogny’s father, who died in 1979, is represented by a photo of him in military uniform and by text from his memoir, projected in English on the set’s rain curtain . These excerpts recount how her father, growing up when Senegal was still a French colony, was trained by teachers and priests to despise his mother’s religion and to strive to become as Christian and European as possible.