Dance is Change, in Motion

How a Dancer from Kansas City and her Ground-breaking Company Revolutionized North American Dance, and How You Can Join the Movement Too.

Change is in the A.I.R.
Can you feel it? It’s time to move, create, take flight.

February is almost out. March is just around the corner. And if you haven’t heard, dance and movement are afoot on the horizon.

A whole dance movement, in fact, is coming to your screens at home starting as early as next week, in the form of the 2021 Artistry in Rhythm (A.I.R.) Dance Conference.

The event — a month-long, virtual dance symposium tailor-made for our times of social isolation and ever-accumulating anxieties and injustices — will explore how dance, and the performing arts more generally, can serve as vital platforms and powerful catalysts for effecting lasting change in the world, especially for historically-disenfranchised communities relegated to the cultural margins.

A.I.R. Dance Conference 2021 will focus on the power of dance as a form of embodied resilience, a salve and a tool for healing, a way to restore community and connection during troubled times.

Featuring advanced masterclasses and conversations with leading teaching artists and movement experts of the day, A.I.R. Dance packs a star-studded punch of leading movement experts and dance artists; community workshops; creative and professional training; and engaging conversations and performances — all focused on exploring the powerful strength of ‘embodied emancipation’, the forms of resistance and defiant joy, modes of change and transformation that are to be found, discovered and made through communal dance and movement practices in the times of COVID-19… and beyond.

UBW’s Women’s Resistance (Photo: Hayim Heron)

And who better to lead this month-long immersion into the world of socially-engaged dance than the internationally-acclaimed Urban Bush Women (UBW) Dance Company and their iconic Founding Director, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, the award-winning dance visionary whose keynote talk and conversation kicks off the virtual dance symposium next Wednesday, March 3 at 7 p.m. EST.

Jawole’s talk will be followed and complemented by a varied selection of UBW’s signature BOLD learning series, which for over two decades has helped and capacitated artists, activists and audiences to create change at the intersections of professional and community art-making, formal virtuosity and historical transformation.

Dancers from UBW will also engage 11 select dancers in a special iteration of their Artist Journal intensive, a 3-week virtual collaboration and training that will culminate in an online Zoom performance by the students themselves, on Friday, March 12 at 7 p.m. EST.

The 2021 A.I.R. Dance Conference will honor UBW and Jawole Jo Zollar’s decades-long pursuit of equity, social justice, and empowerment through the dance arts — centering issues of race, gender, health, sustainability, and restoration; and demonstrating, again and again, the socially transformative power of expressive movement and dance at our most crucial historical juncture in recent memory.

The virtual residency of the groundbreaking company and its visionary founder at A.I.R. Dance 2021 is but the latest chapter of a longstanding, ongoing collaboration with Live Arts Miami and Miami Dade College that goes as far back as 1990, when we were still known as Cultura del Lobo.

Are We Democracy, presented by Live Arts Miami in 2012 (Photo: Irma Gutierrez, The Reporter)

Three decades that may in retrospect, and by the light of a uniquely eventful pandemic year, seem like more than a century. And it may as well be, considering how much has been done already, and how much there is still left to do.

We’re not done with this century yet, and we’ve a number of surprises and collaborations still up our sleeves with the group.

But more on that later.

For now, let’s start with a little background, a brief look behind the curtain at the life and legacy of Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, visionary mother to UBW—the crown jewel of a truly admirable personal and professional track that has earned the iconic dancer and choreographer a permanent place in the Pantheon of contemporary dance in the United States and beyond.

From Kansas City, Missouri to Brooklyn, New York:
Who is Jawole Willa Jo Zollar?

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar (Photo: Crush Boone)

Jawole Wille Jo Zollar’s career has been so expansive and lauded, her contributions to the field so varied and notable—so profound and long-lasting—that it is not an exaggeration to say she is, as she is so often called, a true pillar of North American dance, an artist who’s championed the performing arts as a crucial and necessary platform from which to effect social change.

But don’t let her iconoclast status or storied activist history fool you. Zollar is also known for an infectious and joyous charisma, an engaging story-teller unafraid of polemic but also prone to a good, heart-filling laugh.

A woman whose favorite color is orange, favorite food is arugula, and whose favorite quote, at least as of the last time she was asked, is “Go for What You Know,” a maxim she has most certainly lived by.

Zollar was born in Kansas City in the 1950’s, where she trained with Joseph Stevenson, a student of the legendary Katherine Dunham. From her hometown in Missouri she propelled herself—a brilliant comet dancing proudly through the darkness of the times— to a metropolis far, far away, but not without first landing in the sunshine state, where she received her M.F.A. in dance from Florida State University, after earning her B.A. in dance from the University of Missouri at Kansas City.

In 1980, Zollar moved to New York City — the quintessential ground-zero for the kind of bold, daring, and socially-engaged forms of creative experimentation and innovation that would become lasting marks of her work — to study dance with Dianne McIntyre at Sounds in Motion but soon left McIntyre’s studio and began a new adventure that would change the world of dance… for good.

There, in the beautiful, bustling, and poverty-addled Brooklyn of the 1980’s, surrounded at all turns by the many-tentacled systems of racial discrimination, seggregation, and state-sanctioned violence that gripped the city and nation, the brave and brilliant Zollar broke out on her own, parted with collaborators and convention alike, and founded the incredibly influential and internationally-acclaimed Urban Bush Women Dance Company.

UBW’s I Don’t Know, but I Been Told, If You Keep on Dancin’ Yo (Photo: Heron)

To this day, the company has won no less than five grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and a prestigious fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts; toured five continents; and performed at venues like the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and The Kennedy Center, to name but a few.

Over three incredible decades of tireless work and celebrated experimentation, pushing the envelope of contemporary dance with visionary, socially conscious and often explicitly political pieces—34 in total under Zollar’s direction alone—UBW has become a recognized leader in the field, a company that has, as the Village Voice points out, “interpreted the black experience with unparalleled passion and focus.”

An Inspiring Vision, a Prophetic Dream, and Some Good Advice: The Origins of a Legendary Dance Company

UBW’s I Don’t Know, but I Been Told, If You Keep on Dancin’ Yo (Photo: Heron)

As is so often the case with the birth of world-changing artistic projects, Urban Bush Women Dance Company began with vision, dream and revelation in equal parts — a synchronicity of prophetic images, chance encounters and meaningful coincidences that set Zollar and her then-nascent project on an inevitable and impassioned quest toward greatness.

“I was starting to think about it…” she recounts of those early and formative years, noting the great self-doubt elicited by the financial and personal struggles faced by dance contemporaries and predecessors that had set out on their own: Alvin Ailey, Dianne McIntyre, Eleo Pomare… “What makes me think I can do this, because this is really hard… ” she wondered, only to experience a number of events that helped to clear things up, for good this time.

One such event, recounts the dancer, was a visit to a visionary art exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum that showed her the inimitable power of boldly pursuing her personal dreams and artistic aspirations of breaking out on her own:

“these [artists] were all people who were doing their work not from some idea of being successful, but out of an impulse that they had to do it. They had some calling, some revelation, some vision that made them become artists, and when I saw the power of this work, that they’re not worried about all those external things, they’re just doing their work. That was one revelation.”

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar (Photo: Rick McCollough)

Another was a powerful and prophetic dream where she listened to her father sing, “Success is not the test, success is not the test,” to the tune of the Civil War-era Spiritual ‘Oh Mary Don’t You Weep,’ while she sat for dinner in a circle, in the middle of the ocean, before a wave swallowed up the scene.

Though enigmatic, the significance of the dream wasn’t lost on the young Zollar. If success was not the test, as her father’s song proclaimed, what was there to do but try, and try again?

This revelation, combined with the fortuitous and timely observation of a keen observer in her life, allowed the wave from that prophetic dream to wash away the last remnants of doubt: “you need to have your own company, your own work.” [1]

And so she did.

Urban Bush Women burst onto the dance scene in 1984 with bold, innovative, demanding, and exciting works that bring under-told stories to life through Jawole’s award-winning art and vision. The company weaves contemporary dance, music, and text with the history, culture, and spiritual traditions of the African Diaspora.

Under Zollar’s artistic direction, Urban Bush Women performs regularly in New York City and tours nationally and internationally. The Company has been commissioned by presenters nationwide, and includes among its honors a New York Dance and Performance Award (“Bessie”); the Capezio Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dance; a Black Theater Alliance Award; and two Doris Duke Awards for New Work from the American Dance Festival. In 2017, Zollar received a Bessie Award for Lifetime Achievement in Dance.

UBW dancer, Chanon Judson, leads EBX workshop (Photo: Shannel Resto)

Off the stage, Urban Bush Women has developed an extensive community engagement program called BOLD (Builders, Organizers, and Leaders through Dance) that features a network of facilitators who travel nationally and internationally to conduct workshops that elevate the histories and concerns of local communities through performance and socially-engaged dance practices.

The company launched Urban Bush Women Choreographic Center in 2016 to support the development of women choreographers of color and other underheard voices and to this day remains the central hub and laboratory for the fruitful excavation of the intersections of dance and social justice, movement practices and community building, creative expression and change.

It is this powerful work, and the specialized expertise that has resulted from their more than 30 years of experience of community-led work under BOLD, that the acclaimed dance company brings now to their virtual residency at the upcoming 2021 Artistry in Rhythm (A.I.R.) Dance Conference. Are you ready to take flight?

Urban Bush Women Returns to Miami: See You in the A.I.R.

Generative Practice (Photo courtesy of Urban Bush Women)

This March 3 – 27, you too can celebrate the socially transformative and restorative power of dance with the international-acclaimed African American women’s dance company known as one of “America’s Cultural Treasures,” and their ultra-inspiring founder.

• Hear directly from UBW’s iconic founder at the conference’s Keynote Talk and Conversation with Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, on Wednesday, March 3 at 7 p.m. EST

Experience selections from the historic dance company’s foundational series of BOLD trainings, and watch the result of their direct engagement with Miami’s community of dancers-in-training:

• ‘Entering, Building, and Exiting Community,’ or EBX, a workshop on creative change-making through dance and social practices led by UBW, on March 5 & 6 from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. EST
• ‘Artist Journal’: A 3 week creative intensive led by UBW culminating in an online performance showcasing the work of UBW with 11 local students, on March 12 at 7 p.m. EST.
• ‘The Generative Practice’: a virtual think tank and generative community workshop exploring dance as a socially-engaged practice, on March 27, from 10 a.m. – 12 p.m. EST

Whatever you do, don’t ignore the movement that’s afoot, the new dance of resilient movement looming large on the horizon.

Change is very much in the A.I.R. And the times demand transformation. Will you rise up with us this March and join the nation’s leading movement experts?

It’s time to Move. Create. Take Flight.

Visit www.LiveArtsMiami.org for a full schedule of events.