Urban Bush Women presents Legacy + Lineage + Liberation

In honor of Urban Bush Women’s 40th Anniversary,

Legacy + Lineage + Liberation

celebrates the power of Women(+) in an evening of new and classic works that transcend genres and amplify the voices of Women(+) of color.

Ground-breaking dance theater company Urban Bush Women brings Legacy + Lineage + Liberation, an evening of deeply-affecting works exploring the Civil Rights movement, ancestral wisdom, and the expansion of women’s rights. Urban Bush Women articulates under-told stories through dance informed by the Women+ and African Diasporic experience.

This dynamic program features new work by Co-Artistic Directors Chanon Judson and Mame Diarra Speis and iconic works by Founder Jawole Willa Jo Zollar. Each of these works gives multiple dimensions of life that resonate in this time of reflection around equity and justice, and that lift up+ Black lives in inspiring ways. Experience UBW’s great sense of musicality, reflection inside of empathy and joy, and leave the theater energized and inspired. Works include but are not limited to: Give Your Hands to Struggle; Women’s Resistance; I Don’t Know but I Been Told…if You Keep on Dancin’ You Never Grow Old; and Haint Blu (proscenium).

PROGRAM REPERTORY:

I Don’t Know, but I Been Told, If You Keep on Dancin’ You Never Grow Old (1989)

The opening solo of I Don’t Know… is an excerpt from, Visible

by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and nora chipaumire with Marguerite Hemmings

An energetic mash-up of different dance forms that came out of Black neighborhoods and features a live drummer.

Give Your Hands to Struggle (1998)
Choreography: Jawole Willa Jo Zollar

Lyrically honors leaders from the Civil Rights era

Women’s Resistance (2008)

Choreography: Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Germaine Acogny (Compagnie Jant-Bi)

Fuses power and grace in a call to collective action around truths that bind us all

Haint Blu: Episode 1 – Listenin’ and Dreamin’: Do You Hear Me Now? (2023)

Choreography by Chanon Judson & Mame Diarra  Speis, Co-Artistic Directors

A dance-theater work seeped in memory and magic using performance as a center and source of healing, taking us through movement into stillness and rest.