Urban Bush Women

In the book Urban Bush Woman; Twenty Years of African American Dance Theater, Community Engagement, and Working It Out, by Nadine George-Graves, follows the projects and artistic values used by the company founder and artistic director of the company “Urban Bush Women”, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar.

This book focuses on storytelling the long history of African and African American people through a newly developed creative process which re-contextualizes and re-imagined these historic stories of migration, Diaspora, place-making, survival, gender, and queerness through movement. The movement style that is used in by Zollar to create these incredible and innovative pieces like Praise House, Bones and Ash: A Gilda Story, and Shadow’s Child is a combination of hip-hop, jazz, ballet, and modern to create a freeing and full mind, body and spirit encompassing form of dance called liturgical dance.

This form of dance was developed and adapted to be used now to recapture the historical meaning of this practice. During slavery times African and African American people were denied learning all forms of the Eurocentric communication like reading, writing and English. This of course forced African and African American people to find a new way of communicating through movement and vocal communication like singing, chanting, and sound making. The liturgical dance also finds its own way to bring those together to connect spiritually to God which is very much attached and informed by Christianity.

In chapter three, The Word: Black Magic Realism, Nadine discusses the use of movement in this form in three different pieces. The one I think was most effective in the re-imagined storytelling of historical African and African American stories is the film adaptation Praise House directed by Julie Dash. The film is based on a true story of a woman named Minnie Evans. Minnie, and African American woman in her forties one day heard a voice tell her to “draw or die” which sent her into an uncontrollable need to draw. For the next fifty-seven years she continued this practice guided by this voice. The film features the growth of one of the three characters, Mama. Mama’s daughter, Hannah, and mother, Granny, can both hear and see the angels protecting them but Mama cannot. They both dance all the time and are taken over by the spiritual connection constantly. One day Granny dies, and Mama lost all hope, emotionally distraught, and fed up with Hannah’s nonsense with the “angels” finally finds one day the only thing left, her spiritual connection. She reclaims her strength by finally giving into the angels strength and is taken over with dance movement. The moral of the story is that with all other resources exhausted the one that did not fail Mama was her mind, body, and spiritual connection.

This story and the others discussed in this chapter are Zollar and Urban Bush Women’s attempts to retell stories of migration, Diaspora, survival, place-making, gender, and queerness through movement and the long history of African and African American people re-imagined and re-contextualized.

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