Dance and Social Justice: UBW, Ananya Dance Theatre and me

Hair and Other Stories

Urban Bush Women

BRIC

January 31-February 9

Here's one of those productions that people are going to be talking about for a very, very long time. But when I talk about Hair and Other Stories it, I don't even know how to label it, because it's not a dance show. It's a spectacle, a marketplace, a cultural archive, a community chat about race, a hot dance party, a chance to get your hair trimmed by a really smooth barber and, I guess, anything that you--as an engaged audience member--are willing to get yourselves into. You are an essential part of it. All of this unfolds at BRIC, where Urban Bush Women has been enjoying a residency, and hooray for BRIC for this exciting curation. I danced some (to the irresistible DJ-ing of The Illustrious Blacks), and I also sat in rapt admiration as members of Urban Bush Women threw down some of the most vibrant, urgent and gorgeous performing I've seen from them or from anyone in a very long time. Performing to meet the needs of our times--direct, uncompromising, utilizing the far reaches of their physical and expressive energies, and presenting issues of race and culture inside a multilayered, multifaceted context that emphasizes the expansive richness of what it means to be Black. Choreographed by Chanon Judson (whose intense performance seared me) and Samantha Speis in collaboration with UBW. Bessie nominations to the team on this one, please. Hair and Other Stories INFO/TICKETS

Urban Bush Women in
Hair and Other Stories

Ananya Dance Theatre in
Shaatranga: Women Weaving Worlds
(photo: Randy Karels)

Symposium on Dance & Social Justice

Dance Department, Mason Gross School of the Arts

Rutgers University

February 1

I spent yesterday afternoon and evening on the Rutgers campus, the guest of dance artist Ananya Chatterjea of Ananya Dance Theatre, who is wrapping up a residency at Rutgers's Mason Gross School of the Arts, and cared for graciously by Dance Department Chair and Artistic Director, Julia Ritter, Ph.D and MFA in Dance Director, Jeff Friedman, Ph.D. Chatterjea had invited me to join her panel on dance and social justice* which included Hui Nui Wilcox, Ph.D, educator and Ananya company member; Zaneta Rago-Craft, Director at Rutgers's Center for Social Justice Education and LGBT Communities; and Lela Aisha Jones, dance artist and Founding Director of Lela Aisha Jones│FlyGround.

Afterwards, I enjoyed a soul-warming dinner and conversation with some fun table-mates--among them, Jones and Donia Salem (Executive Director, The Outlet Dance Project). Then we all took in ADT's Shaatranga: Women Weaving Worlds (which concludes at Rutgers's Loree Dance Theatre this evening). Chatterjea's vision for her all-women ensemble blends contemporary with classical Indian movement, serene visual design and formal choreography with a confident infusion of the rebellious personal and political spirit she first observed in the theatrical street demonstrations led by Indian women and trans femme activists. Learn more about ADT's residency here.

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*My opening remarks from the day's panel

The arts have always been my refuge--from a sometimes difficult home; from an often difficult society. Up until recently, I was able to say out loud how much I counted my blessings to have work that would always surround me with artists.

That was true for my work as a dance writer and certainly even more true now for my work as a curator for a major dance center.

Artists were my bulwark, my grounding force, my heat shield. But is that what artists are for?

Not today.

I have an old friend out on the West Coast, a former New Yorker, who is Black and indigenous and queer, a poet and visual artist. One day when I was complaining to her on Facebook Messenger about the general run of things in Grump’s America, she reached into that multifaceted basket of hard experience and wisdom to remind me that it’s actually an honor to be alive now in this challenging time.

And I flashed back to what the poet June Jordan wrote, “We are the ones we have been waiting for.” It truly says something fierce about us--and about some committed vow that we must have made before being born--that we are right here and right now with our eyes open and our skills sharpened. Ready to rumble.

As children are torn from their parents at the southern border or mis-educated in their schools or shot to death in those same schoolrooms, artists are not, for me or for any of us, just something to lean upon or hide behind or be distracted by.

Artists are knights, armored up and charging forward into the worst of things. Because how can they not?

Their capacity to honestly witness, process, analyze, dream up, brainstorm and collaborate and build with others are what we need now, because we are coming up out of a deep and deeply-troubled sleep, roused by multiple monsters of oppression.

And what of our artists?  If they are not, themselves, prone to the American way of denying, hiding, numbing the self or following addictive distractions down all sorts of sinkholes, our artists are doing their work despite the fact that they themselves might be on the verge of nausea, or they somehow manage to keep going with only that one. last. good. nerve.

A dance artist I once interviewed noted how much Black/lesbian/poet/warrior/mother Audre Lorde influenced him. He remembered that she would always ask, pointedly, “Are you doing your work?”

Most of the artists I know and respect are doing just that--their work--with more focus and determination than ever before. Which does not make it nice and easy for the rest of us. It provides no hiding place. One of the dancers of Urban Bush Women said it best last night at the premiere of Hair and Other Stories: “Safe space is not comfortable space.”

The windstorm kicked up by those knights artistic as they charge past us cannot be ignored. We are caught up in it, too, swept along to the battleground.

As my West Coast friend would say, There are no mistakes. We are meant to be here. We are the ones we have been waiting for. Let’s do our work.

-- Eva Yaa Asantewaa


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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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Urban Bush Women's "Hair Parties" at 92Y Harkness

Madame C. J. Walker (1867-1919)
Hair care entrepreneur, philanthropist and activist
America's first woman millionaire

Urban Bush Women's Hair Parties is a boldly hybrid event integrating excerpts of a developing dance (premiere of Hair & Other Stories coming this spring) with a community-sharing workshop in kitchen table-like settings. I'd imagine each "audience"--surely, that's not the right word here--brings a different energy to it and ultimately determines how well it will work.

After all, the folks who participate are what it's about. Through a variety of activities, they're encouraged to remember and tell stories about things they learned, from childhood on, about beauty and grooming and to contemplate how those seminal influences affect their attitudes towards themselves and others today. It's very much about--as one of the dancer/facilitators noted--"practices that allow us to stay inside our greatness" and those that drag us far from it.

Oh, you surely know UBW, the lifework of the great, beloved Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, is a Black troupe, right? But while Hair Parties must be a blast in an all-Black gathering, its meditations on race can be useful for anyone from any culture--as was evident yesterday afternoon at 92Y's Harkness Dance Center where the presenters embraced a multicultural gathering.

Somebody here thinks they came for a show!

We're going on a journey!

A journey it was, indeed--starting with the sight of dancer Samantha Speis arranging, thoughtfully gazing upon and slightly rearranging a collection of hair care products, almost as if they were chess pieces. For me, this brief, subtle moment was amusing, a subtlety anyone caring for Black people's hair in the "natural" way will recognize. We know how much time and money we put into experimenting to get just the right products used in the right combination or sequence for the particular texture and willfulness of our hair. Tell me that's not choreography!

Dancers invited us to come together around certain agreements on how to work as a community--such as "speaking from the I"--and gave us gestural movements to anchor each agreement, in a fun way, in our bodies. We watched a dance segment depicting a Black woman suffering "hair hell" in an elevator populated first by a group of mocking Black people and then by white people whose very different attention to her hair freaked her out just as much or even more. We learned a tiny bit about the Black hair care entrepreneur Madame C. J. Walker (1867-1919), who went from being the child of enslaved parents to being the first American woman to make a million. From table to table, we performed a shared reading of lines from a letter Zollar addressed to this fascinating pioneer. And we moved with the dancers.

The party kicked up memories for many of us. I was stunned when I suddenly recalled the Breck Girl shampoo ads of the 1960s and later bonded with a white woman over these memories. These ubiquitous magazine ads were in my face--all of our faces--at a time when it would have been more useful for me to be learning about Madame Walker. Do you remember them, too?

As I left 92Y, I actually had a pleasant elevator moment when the same woman who remembered those darn Breck girls told me she'd come to the Hair Parties event terribly drained and tired and came away feeling exhilarated. This, I think, is pretty much the hallmark of an Urban Bush Woman event, and I'm glad she got that healing.

Conceived and choreographed by Chanon Judson and Samantha Speis in collaboration with the company--Du'Bois A'Keen, Chanon Judson, Courtney J. Cook, Jaimé Dzandu, Rochelle Jamila, Samantha Speis and Tendayi Kuumba

Music composed by The Illustrious Blacks (Manchildblack and Monstah Black)

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The anatomy of change: Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and LIz Lerman at Harlem Stage

Impressions of: Blood, Muscle, Bone: the anatomy of wealth and poverty

by Eva Yaa Asantewaa, The Dance Enthusiast, October 14, 2013

What's moving downtown, moving the Bronx

Look sharp!

There's dance moving all over town... 

La MaMa Moves Dance Festival

Chamber Works 1--featuring Dark Matter by Juliette Mapp; present.tense (progressive) by Maura Donohue; and So be it--not a piece--miniatures for five by Vicky Shick. May 11-13. La MaMa’s The Club, 74A East 4th Street, 2nd Floor.[information and tickets]

Beauty--Jane Comfort and Company. "...a gimlet-eyed look at the extremes women go to achieve impossible beauty." May 17-20, 7:30pm La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre, 66 East 4th Street, 2nd Floor. [information and tickets]

La MaMa
[map/directions]

Dancing While Black: Voices from the Bush
a presentation of BAAD!'s 2012 Boogie Down Dance Series

Thursday, May 17, 8pm

Featuring current and former dancers from Urban Bush Women--Maria Bauman, LoveForte (Marjani Forte and Nia Love), Paloma McGregor and Samantha Speis--who present their own brazen dance works as part of Dancing While Black, "an artist-led project/initiative that explores many questions including what does it mean to be a Black artist today in order to shift the power of contextualizing work and articulating aesthetic values into the hands, and bodies, of black dancers themselves."

For more information on this and all Boogie Down festival events and to purchase tickets, click here or call 718-842-5223.

BAAD! The Bronx Academy of Arts & Dance
841 Barretto Street, 2nd Floor, Bronx
(map/directions)

What a difference...

...a dancer makes.

I'm thinking of Katherine Crockett, that tall drink of water, brightening my evening as she defined the prophetic Chorus in Martha Graham's Cave of the Heart. She works that broad-striped fabric of her costume, unfolds it like a condor's wings and radiantly projects over what seems a vast distance in space and time with dire, desperate gestures that, for all their silence, "sound" to me like trumpets. I saw her, I heard her. There was no one and nothing like her on stage, then or later. Everything else seemed carefully managed and remote--even Bulareyaung Pagarlava's brand-new Chasing, a work that sets out to prove that Graham standard bearers can cut loose and frisk around. (Martha Graham Dance Company at The Rose Theater, now through Sunday. Click here for information and tickets.)

Souleymane Badolo (photo: Julie Lemberger for 92Y)

Speaking of difference, curating is something new and different for the great Jawole Willa Jo Zollar of Urban Bush Women fame. With her lineup for 92Y, running this weekend, she's offering a chance to watch distinctive performers like Souleymane Badolo, Lacina Coulibaly (his Burkina Faso compatriot), Maria Bauman, Samantha Speis and surprise guest Christal Brown bring ideas and space to gleaming life. The program includes works by Badolo and Bauman and two works inspired by Zollar's "Blind Date" invitation in which she matches pairs of dance artists for a last-minute creative relationship, just hours before the actual performance. If you, as a dance fan, look for the cohesion and depth that long-term creative process allows, this sort of thing is certainly a gamble, but the intelligence and power of these select artists reward Zollar's risk and your time. Having a chance to see a program with so much Badolo and Badolo choreography in it made me notice his uncanny relationship to performance space, the way he habitually dwells in or treads its periphery, rarely occupying its center or sending his dancers there. If memory serves me, I've seen this sort of thing in much of his work. Now I'm eager to find out why. (Jawole Willa Jo Zollar Curates, 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Festival, now through Sunday. Click here for information and tickets.)

Black and Boundless: Gesel Mason and Faustin Linyekula

As a young dance student, fan and developing writer, I straddled the dividing line between firmly-defined, traditional modern dance (Graham, Ailey, etc.) and experimental postmodern dance. I remember how confusing and even upsetting it used to be for some audiences and critics to see Black dance artists color outside the box and explore uncharted territory.

DC-based dancer-choreographer Gesel Mason forthrightly addresses that moment in time and its lingering issues with her video-and-dance presentation, No Boundaries: Dancing the Visions of Contemporary Black Choreographers, presented through tonight at Joyce SoHo.

Mason's program features works by provocative choreographers from different generations--Donald McKayle, Reggie Wilson, Bebe Miller, David Rousseve and young Samantha Speis--and includes her own solo, No Less Black (2000). Interspersing video clips of these artists and others talking with Mason about their work provides both helpful context and charm. Wilson cheekily reveals what he likes about being a choreographer--"organizing and telling people what to do." Later, when asked pointblank for a definition of Black dance, Wilson drops his head and laughs. Miller--like Andrea E. Woods, who appears in the video but does not have a work in the show-- expresses a lack of interest in people's assumptions about how she, as a Black woman, should make dance. Jawole Willa Jo Zollar considers the work of Miller and of the early Bill T. Jones (with his partner, the late Arnie Zane) and detects the influence of Black culture where other observers might be prone to see only avantgarde edginess. McKayle notes that no one is ever asked to define what, if anything, white dance is.

The evening's highlight is Mason's harrowing and heartbreaking performance in Rousseve's Jumping the Broom (2005). This solo overlaps the stories of a lynching victim clad in her wedding gown and a proud, hopeful lesbian couple turned away at the last moment from City Hall.

Mason's project, running for just two evenings, deserves to be seen again and before sold-out audiences. First of all, it's rare in New York to see work by several keenly innovative Black choreographers showcased on a single program. Let's have more of this. Second, Mason's bright skill, enthusiasm and sense of fun serve her aims well. (How to Watch a Modern Dance Concert or What in the Hell Are They Doing on Stage is the name of one piece she has performed in Washington, DC for last year's version of No Boundaries.) She's clearly an artist on a mission but one who does not wear out her welcome.

Congolese dancer-choreographer Faustin Linyekula of Les Studios Kabako--who debuted Festival of Lies at BRICK Arts/Media/Bklyn this week--also concludes his run tonight. This is another show that deserves a return engagement. Using the format of a late-night ndombolo party--with a cabaret set-up featuring food and drink for purchase and hot, irresistible music by the band Asiko--Linyekula and his performers mix cool, impeccable design, cool but increasingly engaged performance, storytelling, projected text from political speeches, installation-style props and somewhat-edgy audience participation for an evening of mostly oblique and sometimes direct critique of lying politicians. Yes, the text--projected off to the side on the wall above the band where it's quite easy to ignore--comes from the mouths of Linyekula's countrymen but, given who's been ruling Washington lately, Americans can certainly relate.

The show runs way over two hours, including cast and audience dancing together at the end. Some of it feels excessive, less than necessary. But the music--swift as river rapids and as unrelenting--rocks steady, and the movement of the Damballah-pliant dancers--Linyekula, Papy Ebotani and Djodjo Kazadi--amid continuously-rearranged flourescent light bulbs is almost always fascinating. And Linyekula brings a message that Gesel Mason would surely endorse--that a people must ignore how they are defined by others and take back the power to define themselves. Let's dance!

(c) Eva Yaa Asantewaa, 2007