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Reviewed by:
  • Urban Bush Women: Twenty Years of Working It Out by Nadine George-Graves
  • Nicole Hodges Persley
Urban Bush Women: Twenty Years of Working It Out. By Nadine George-Graves. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 2010.

Nadine George-Graves presents a compelling history of the Brooklyn community-based dance troupe Urban Bush Women, founded in 1984 by dancer/choreographer Jawole Willa Joe Zollar. Comprised primarily of African American female dancers, Urban Bush Women are dedicated to developing a repertoire of works that create a “physical rhetoric or corporeal argumentation that attempts to activate audiences to attend to the complexities of daily life in terms of race, gender, spirituality, special relations, political power, aesthetics and community life when we are reluctant to do so” (3). Graves theorizes the Urban Bush Women’s choreographic process through her multivalent concept of “working.” The author suggests this process of working is “emblematic of how individuals and communities work through social anxieties using layers of performance (3) to imagine notions of self and community empowerment. Healing occurs for the dancers and the audience when “one works the roots, works the body, works the soul, works the tangles out” (4). George-Graves unsettles notions of improvisation’s general conflation with, here as superficial spontaneity (here in dance) to offer a reading of improvisational practices as a complex process of knowing produced by the artist’s capacity to call and respond to learned techniques, lived experiences and cross-cultural exchanges. The author identifies the use of “narrative, mystical beings, ancestors and supernatural plots to create scenarios for conquering hardships” (xiii) as key components of choreographic knowledge production. [End Page 191] Her analysis offers dance as theatrical site of community building, healing and self-definition.

George-Graves’ fifteen years of ethnographic work “trying to get to know Zollar, members of her company, and their work” (xii) is reflected in rich detailed descriptions of the rehearsal and performance processes of Urban Bush Women. Each of the six chapters tracks a facet of the choreographic experience from development and rehearsal to performance and community engagement. George-Graves’ analysis of the Urban Bush Women’s works reveals an aesthetic practice that borrows from African, European, and African Diasporic dance forms and Eastern and Western spiritual traditions. These references impact her description of their aesthetic as “technique blends, pedestrianism, strength, breath, pace, emotion, playfulness and energy” (35) that empower Zollar and her dancers to “challenge their audiences to reimagine society and renounce old definitions of black dance, and indeed, black identity” (6).

The detailed rehearsal and performance descriptions informed by original interviews with Urban Bush Women members are particularly rich in Chapter 3, “The Word- Black Magic Realism.” Accounts of Praise House, a tribute to the late African American folk artist Minnie Evans and Bones and Ash: A Gilda Story, a multi-media dance piece inspired by Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories, underscores Urban Bush Women’s embodied affirmations of the diversity of black women’s experiences. The depths of archival research their performances require expand the corporeal discourse of the black body and its intersection with textual narrative, spirituality, voice and community. George-Graves’ exploration of the process of creating and embodying choreography as site to explore the fluidity of racial identities, specifically blackness, is a significant scholarly intervention that scholars engaged in any aspect of race, gender and performance research would find of interest.

Nicole Hodges Persley
The University of Kansas
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