Urban Bush Women: telling it with sass and style - a dance company created in 1984 by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar featuring history, culture and traditions of African Americans

Dance Magazine, May, 2003 by Brenda Dixon Gottschild

In the witty and caustic tradition of African American wordplay, the name Urban Bush Women plays games with us. Filled with double meanings, it suggests guerrilla warfare, city smarts, and a streetwise slang word for the female anatomy. Its founder and artistic director, the diminutive, quicksilver Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, has created works that integrate dance, music, and theater in an innovative brew with a distinctive flavor. Over the past two decades the all-women ensemble has paved the way for narration in postmodern dance and revolutionized the image of the female dancing body. Big or small, short or tall, UBW's diversity defies a stereotyped ideal. Its work is frequently based on personal stories and women's lore, and is drawn from African traditions. The funny and pungent HairStories (2001) explores conflicts around black women's hair, beauty, and self-esteem; Batty Moves (1995) celebrates the female buttocks ("batty," in Caribbean-speak)--a particularly touchy topic for dancers trained to "tuck it under"; Sheller (1988), inspired by a bag lady on a Manhattan sidewalk, suggests how close we all are to homelessness. In each case Zollar shapes the movement vocabulary to meet her dramatic needs. Her choreography combines text, musical accompaniment, and motifs inspired by African, pedestrian, modern, and social dance techniques. The result is a repertoire of heart-wrenching, soul-searching works that communicate the ecstasy and agony of the human condition.

Zollar began formal dance training in her native Kansas City, Missouri, with ballet classes at the age of 6, but soon transferred to community classes run by Joseph Stevenson, a Katherine Dunham alumnus. She received her BA in dance from the University of Missouri at Kansas City and, in 1980, her MFA in dance from Florida State University.

Storytelling, along with dance and music, is a revered form of African art. Smiling wryly, Zollar says, "I fought all through college and even in my professional career for the idea of storytelling in dance, because it's always considered a lower art form." Her love of this tradition was stimulated by her college training. All of her elective undergraduate courses were in theater. In graduate school, she performed with collegiate drama troupes and studied the work of avant-garde directors such as Peter Brook and collectives such as the Free Southern Theater. She read the writings of Antonin Artaud, which espoused a radical, gutsy approach to art-making. These influences help explain the social and political dimensions of her work. Zollar formed her company "to explore culture as a catalyst for social change, creative expression, and spiritual renewal."

At FSU Zollar created Crossings (1978), about her mother's passing away. "The women were all in white--the idea of hospital gowns," she recalls soberly. "It was dark, gestural, very primal. I had a mixed cast, but at some point all the black dancers dropped out. At the same time I did Fanga (based on a traditional Liberian welcome dance brought from Africa by Pearl Primus). One of my teachers said, `Were you trying to say that the white world is dying, and the black world is alive, healthy, and happy?'" Zollar was stunned and thought, "It doesn't matter what I do; they'll always see it in racial terms."

As an African American woman working in the white-dominated realm of concert dance, Zollar has had to contend with subtle levels of bias. She ruefully explains, "It was frustrating in the beginning that I was viewed as a naive artist, as though I were exploring in certain ways because I didn't know any better." But she was seeking what she calls "a visceral response to an emotion" and consciously rejecting the formal structures taught in college classes.

Reading articles by Trisha Brown and Deborah Hay led her to explore everyday movement "because, to me, it was the same thing in African dance but reinterpreted in the postmodern context." Like these artists, Zollar's work was minimalist. She says she was "getting at the energy of the movement without the feet being pointed or the legs straightened." After college she studied in New York with Kei Takei because she was attracted by her natural movement and collaborative process, and with Dianne McIntyre, who uses the energy of African dance in a modern dance context with live music.

Despite its concert dance profile, UBW thrives on community collaboration, which Zollar regards in a special light: "When I'm doing a piece that is for the stage, it needs to serve my creative needs. When I'm doing a work that is in and about a community, it needs to serve something about what that community has brought me there for. It's a different kind of relationship and a different way of solving problems."

UBW's neighborhood collaborations have included residencies in Tallahassee, New Orleans, New Haven, and Philadelphia. In a six-week collaboration, the story of Dixwell, a historic black neighborhood adjacent to Yale University, was created by UBW dancers and enacted by community members in song, dance, drill-team marching, recorded interviews, and drumming (see Reviews, DANCE MAGAZINE, October 2001, page 100).