Brenda Dixon Gottschild

TELLING IT WITH SASS AND STYLE: URBAN BUSH WOMEN

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 Joe 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 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”; Shelter (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 repertory 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 Conservatory of Music. They weren’t much fun for this active six-year-old, so her parents transferred her to community classes run by Joseph Stevenson, a Katherine Dunham alumnus. She received her B.A. in dance from the University of Missouri at Kansas City and, in 1980, her M.F.A. in dance from Florida State University (FSU).

Storytelling, along with dance and music, are revered forms of African art. Zollar says, smiling wryly, “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 genre 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 like Peter Brook and collectives like the Free Southern Theater. She read the writings of Antonin Artaud that espoused a radical, gutsy approach to art- making. These influences help explain the social and political dimensions of her work. In fact, 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 had a mixed cast, but at some point all the black dancers dropped out. At the same time I also did “Fanga” (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 naïve artist, as though I was 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 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, attracted by her natural movement and collaborative process, and 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 Dance Magazine review, October 2001.)

Shadow’s Child (2002) culminates a four-year exchange between UBW and the National Company of Song and Dance of Mozambique. This poignantly danced musical spectacle, about young girls showing courage by overcoming discrimination, has been touring schools and communities for more than a year.

Zollar describes UBW’s technique as a process based on acting games, trust building exercises, and dramatic beats. Robin Wilson, company founding member and currently Assistant Professor of dance at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, describes the UBW work process as “exasperating and exhilarating at the same time. It has given me a sense of ownership never duplicated except in my own work, in part because of the respect granted to each of our contributions and viewpoints.” Another veteran, Wanjiru Kamuyu, declares that the UBW experience “has cultivated in me a sense of openness and flexibility to change, and tremendous artistic growth.” Zollar has influenced a generation of female artists of color, including Marlies Yearby, Cynthia Oliver, Treva Offutt, and Maia Claire Garrison.

She has also had an impact on other major artists of her own generation. Liz Lerman, of Liz Lerman’s Dance Exchange, says, “Jawole inspired me to create change in my own community.” A leader in community residencies, she often gives workshops and creates projects in Jewish communities.

Zollar has set works on the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the Philadelphia Dance Company (Philadanco), and Ballet Arizona. Joan Myers Brown, founder and director of Philadanco says, She created a modified Batty Moves to suit Philadanco and revisited Hands Singing Song to include my male dancers. It’s brilliant the way she can take a work she’s made on her company, tailor it for my company, and it’s the same yet different.”

At FSU, where she is Nancy Smith Fichter Professor of Dance, Zollar teaches a storytelling course: “Nobody teaches how you do it, so I decided that this would be my mantle.” Her faculty position provides time and space to process ideas with her students. For example, Hands Singing Song (1998), an uplifting piece about working to eradicate racism, sexism, and poverty, evolved from a solo for one of her MFA advisees.

Zollar bubbles with enthusiasm about her current projects. Walking With Pearl is inspired by her interest in dancer/anthropologist Pearl Primus, who was one of the first Americans to choreograph African dance for the concert stage. Zollar plans to augment the artistic production with a scholarly statement on Primus’ creative life. Another new project, Eurydice’s Flight, commissioned by the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, will be developed on Zollar’s FSU students. A third project “on the runway” focuses on the history and meanings of “cool.”

About UBW’s upcoming anniversary, Zollar smiles and quips: “Instead of celebrating our twentieth, we’ll celebrate our twenty-first (in 2005). The theme is ‘Free, In The Black, And Twenty-One.’” This witty reversal of the old saying, “Free, White, and Twenty-One” is UBW at its tongue-in-cheek best. Let’s hope they’re here to stay.