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In the tradition
Urban Bush Women celebrate 20 years
BY JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ

When Urban Bush Women made their first appearance in Rhode Island two years ago at Rhode Island College, they presented a new work, Shadow’s Child, that choreographer/artistic director Jawole Willa Jo Zollar had created in collaboration with the National Song and Dance Company of Mozambique. Their return to Providence is sponsored by Providence Black Repertory Company and Brown University. The Friday program combines UBW’s Hair Party, an interactive dialogue about the social and political significance of hair, especially natural African-American hair, with Cheryl West’s Jar the Floor. On Saturday, the seven-member Brooklyn-based company will perform Zollar’s newest piece, Walking with Pearl — The Africa Diaries, which grew out of the journals kept by the seminal (but under-recognized) modern dance choreographer and anthropologist Pearl Primus (1919-1994).

Born in Trinidad, Primus grew up in New York City and graduated from Hunter College. In 1941, she won a scholarship to study with the New Dance Group, where she would encounter such modern masters as Martha Graham. The world of dance opened her heart and mind to the historical, cultural, and social legacy of Africans and African-Americans, and by the mid-’40s, she had begun to present her own pieces, set to poems or songs by African-Americans. Her best-known work from that era, "Hard Time Blues" (1945), was based on a Josh White song about sharecroppers. In 1949, she received her first grant to study dance in Central and West Africa, and it’s that period of time, when she was filming traditional dances and keeping diaries about her travels, that is addressed in Zollar’s Walking with Pearl.

"Her legacy is so vast," Zollar explained in a recent phone conversation from Atlanta, where Urban Bush Women was on tour with Pearl. "She was the first American choreographer to go to Africa as an anthropologist and bring back the dances. She created what we call the lecture/demonstration format that we now take for granted. She created that as a way to show her dances when she returned from Africa, since she didn’t feel that a concert format was the right thing.

"She started the national dance movement and created the model, while working in Liberia, for the national dance ballets that are now throughout Africa," Zollar continued. "She took the folkloric material and formed it into dances that could be replicated. And she challenged body types on stage. She was a very strong, thick-thighed woman, who danced very athletically; she brought a different way of approaching dance."

What the seven members of Urban Bush Women bring out in Walking with Pearl is Primus’s writing about her experiences in Africa. Zollar reads from the impressionistic text on stage, with background music on mbira (Zimbabwean thumb piano) and the West African kora. Zollar stresses that this piece does not recreate traditional dances but makes a contemporary dance from information about and by Primus.

Zollar grew up in Kansas City taking lessons in a community dance school, got a B.A. in dance from the University of Missouri, and an MFA from Florida State University. In 1980, she moved to New York City, where she began to incorporate different movement forms — African dance, T’ai Chi, Caribbean dance, vernacular dance — into contemporary pieces. In 1984, Zollar founded Urban Bush Women to express her vision of African-American heritage, culture, and spirituality through her choreography.

Zollar heard Pearl Primus speak a few years after she had established her company, and it confirmed for her that she was headed in the right direction: "She talked about exploring African-American dance forms and looking at what’s developed in this country, about heightening and celebrating that." Primus traveled extensively in the southern US, living with sharecroppers, visiting black churches, and soaking up both the everyday and ritualistic movements of African-Americans. Urban Bush Women will premiere a second part of Walking with Pearl, titled The Southern Diaries, this summer at the American Dance Festival in North Carolina.

Other dances that Urban Bush Women will present are from their repertory: 1995’s Batty Moves and 1986’s Girlfriends. "Batty" is a word used in the Caribbean to describe the buttocks. Danced to an original percussion score by Junior Wedderburn, Batty Moves focuses on a different type of movement and a different part of the body than much Western dance.

"I ultimately think it’s about how we see beauty," Zollar reflected. "In European society, ballet came out of a celebration of the legs and the feet and the arms. When you visit throughout Africa, you see a celebration of the movement of the buttocks and the breasts. That’s where I see beauty."

Girlfriends, grew out of Zollar’s desire to honor the camaraderie and friendship she had experienced with her college girlfriends. She’s happy to be reprising this dance because it gives her a chance to stop and remember those friends and to recall the time they spent together, sharing laughter and tears, offering each other support and good times.

And Zollar’s thrilled to be celebrating the 20th anniversary year of her company: "Dance in this country is a struggle — for white Americans, for any African-American, and then it’s really a struggle for black women. When you think of my generation, how many other single-vision choreographers are there with companies who have toured nationally at this level?"

Urban Bush Women will perform on Friday, February 25 at 6:30 p.m. at the Providence Black Repertory Company Theatre (276 Westminster Street, [401] 621-7122) and on Saturday, February 26 at 7:30 p.m. at the Providence Performing Arts Center (220 Weybosset Street, [401] 421-ARTS).


Issue Date: February 25 - March 3, 2005
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