Collaboration Lab

Urban Bush Women facilitates artistic creation based on themes that emerge from the group. With an emphasis on dance and song, we use various artistic genres including creative writing and visual art, to process, synthesize, and communicate. Through the Collaboration Lab, participants create an artistic product reflecting both their learning and their vision for community.

Dance for every body

This movement jam/dance class embraces the ideas that each individual has a unique and powerful contribution to make, and that our bodies are a powerful source of agency. The goal is for "every body" to find their level of challenge and comfort and partake according to their abilities, and to appreciate the groups’ diversity as an attribute to their community. This is a movement class designed for the community so no prior dance experience is needed. Participants explore UBW's technique with close attention to the use of breath, weight, call and response and polyrhythm.

This workshop is rooted in UBW's value-centered approach for work in communities, particularly those that are perceived as economically poor and in crisis, to build and expand a movement of practitioners that decolonize approaches and methodologies and move toward building self determined, liberatory engagements. Participants will explore UBW core values and experience a variety of community building exercises to implement into their practice. UBW asks participants to think beyond the immediacy of tools gained to instead embrace understandings that, with implementation and continued practice will enhance their understanding of their work and its impact, to ensure judgments don’t inadvertently privilege hierarchical values and reject our common humanity.

This participatory workshop focuses on self-care, rejuvenation, and (re-) constructing healthful images of ourselves and our communities. As we move, share stories, and discuss holism practices from food choices to daily stress relief, Urban Bush Women BOLD Facilitators offer simple tools for reinhabiting our bodies and reinforcing holism from the inside out. We also bring out and affirm the wisdom that is already in the group, fostering resource exchange and building community. The goal is to bring ourselves to balance, thereby bringing our families and communities to balance as well. No dance or fitness experience is necessary...just a body and a willingness to exhale!

Participants will explore Urban Bush Women’s Legacy works as well as engage in a pre-professional movement study rooted in the “Liberated Pelvis,” a movement methodology created by Co-Artistic Director Mame Diarra Speis, that acts as a portal to enter a durational investigative process, in order to develop artistic expression that can create specific narratives or delineate abstract designs. Within this process, students will be asked to interrogate their discoveries and knowings through an improvisational framework of duration, permission, play and transparency, in addition to organized movement. If participants have no technical dance experience, Dance For Every Body is the best option.