Urban Bush Women: Authentically Lived History
After the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, the Black Arts Movement provided a cultural platform for the proliferation of poetry, writing, performance, music, and visual art that reflected pride and power in Black history and culture. Urban Bush Women expanded the platform through the embodiment of a Black experience through black bodies dancing. They confronted the challenge of representing authentically a lived history within an adversely limiting, predominantly Euro-Centric, conception of the body and its permissible expressions in dance.
In 1984, Four years of performing with Dianne McIntyre’s Sounds in Motion, Jawola Willa Jo Zollar founded Urban Bush Women in New York City. Profoundly inspired by BAM, Urban Bush Women began to explore cultural conceptions and deeply personal expressions of the Black woman’s voice and experience within the African Diaspora.
In an interview with Carol Jenkins, the host of “Black America” at CUNY TV, in 2017 Zollar described her idea to create Urban Bush Women. She said, “I think I was fortunate that one of my major influences was the Black Arts Movement. A lot of that was about writers finding their voice based on the Black American experience. I started thinking about that. Well, what is that in dance? That means that I’m coming with my full self, my full body, and I don’t have to really just be caught up in the image of the body and the way the body moves that Western European, White America dance really dictated.”
UBW developed a strategy of dance making that invites individuals in diverse communities to reveal how bodies experience racism and explore direct collaborative action to transform systemic oppressive forces into dynamic social change. Instead of providing an “outreach” service to meet an arbitrary metric for funding, UBW constructed a method of authentic engagement that both acknowledged an individual’s unique experience within the community while also providing experiential guidance through improvisational and choreographed dance. Zollar describes the process of redefining a strategy for the company in her interview with Jenkins. She said regarding the idea of doing outreach versus quality engagement, “What we learned is that it was often people having a lot of activities to count off how many things they did for grants. ‘We served this many people,’’ and they weren’t quality exchanges. So we started looking strategically at how can we change this? And we started using the term ‘community engagement’ with a specific strategy.” UBW developed a dedicated core ensemble that holds several types of workshops that engage individuals as dance professionals, as performers and artists, and as community-based movement workshops for people of all ages.
Urban Bush Women perform, teach, and build strong bonds that nurture and strengthen women’s voices through partnerships, alliances, and networked centers that engage audience members, professional dancers, choreographers, artists, and teachers throughout the US and the world. They have received international recognition for their performance work and awarded some of the most prestigious awards in dance and activism, including the Bessie Lifetime Achievement in Dance Award, Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, American Conference on Diversity Performing Arts Humanitarian Award, Dance Magazine Award, and many others. They have received honorary doctorates from Columbia College Chicago and Tufts University in Boston. They were the subject in the PBS Documentary “Free to Dance,” and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar was recognized in 2020 by The Ford Foundation as one in fourteen women that are changing the way art is defined in the 21st century.