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8 1 Development Core Values, Process, and Style Abrief word about Zollar’s impetus for starting the company, a description of its early years, and an introduction to the company’s core values are necessary for later analyses. Zollar began dancing when she was about six years old in Kansas City, Missouri. In the 1950s and 1960s, her neighborhood in Kansas City was completely segregated. “We children thought the city was all black because that was our world. The schools were all black; the teachers were all black. I didn’t realize we were confined to certain boundaries. So my cultural world and the models in it were all black.”1 A pivotal exception to this all-black experience came when her mother took her and her sister to the Harvard Conservatory for Music, in the white part of town, which had ballet classes. Her mother targeted this school specifically because she wanted her children to learn ballet. It had a new teacher from Russia, and Zollar’s mother hoped that this foreign-born teacher (i.e., someone removed from U.S. racism) would accept black students. She was correct. There were three black children in the class. However, ballet training didn’t appeal to Zollar, so she soon switched to the neighborhood dancing school, the Joseph Stevenson School of Dance, where she learned a form of Afro-Caribbean Dunham technique. Joseph Stevenson had studied with Katharine Dunham and had also been a ballroom dancer. He taught Zollar to dance from the “inside out” and to develop her own style. The classes were conducted to drumming or jazz by musicians such as Art Blakey and Ahmed Jamal. Zollar was already familiar with these rhythms since her mother was a jazz vocalist, and the movement styles inspired by these rhythms were comfortable to her. Stevenson also had a cabaret ensemble, in which some of the students provided the entertainment at social gatherings. These floorshows were popular in her community, and whenever a black social club was hosting an event, it hired a floorshow. In this variety-style show, Zollar, her sister, and several others would perform the children’s act by improvising to live music. Other performers included a comic, a female impersonator, a stripper, an emcee, and a flash act (highly charged acrobatic tap dancing like the Nicholas Brothers). Zollar has said, “That kind of dance helped shape my aesthetic. Stripping was my first accomplished dance, and that’s what I wanted to be when I grew up. Sometimes the stripper was a female impersonator and we understood that was all right, too.”2 One of the dances Zollar and the other children did was called “The Sacrifice”: they were dressed all in white and performed a sacrifice dance involving a chicken and a volcano. They would get paid relatively good money, and she performed like this until she was about eighteen years old. Then she went to college at the University of Missouri, where she studied theater and dance and earned a bachelor of arts in dance. Later, she had a company in Kansas City called Black Exodus, which (along with a gospel choir called Voices of Black Exodus) combined dance, text, and live music. Through this company, Zollar deepened her commitment to black liberation and contemporaneous social movements. During this time, she also came under the influence of the writings of many 1960s artists and intellectuals, including Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, Deborah Hay, Trisha Brown, and Steve Paxton. Influences of the civil rights movement, the Black Power movement, the Black Arts movement, and second-wave feminism began to permeate her choreography. Even in these early years, the elements of movement vocabularies that would contribute to defining the Urban Bush Women style, particularly the combination of “high” and “low” and “black” and “white” art forms as well as the commitment to social consciousness, began to surface. Zollar went on to earn a master of fine arts degree in dance from Florida State University, where she now teaches when she is not choreographing. In graduate school, she was involved in many communities that influenced her work, including women’s support groups, the Black Theater Guild, the dance department, and the local Yoruba community. She also read Antonin Artaud and decided that she wanted dance theater to have an impact. She studied the work of Peter Brook as well as that of the Free Southern Theater. She studied Haitian, Cuban Brazilian, Congolese, and “what we thought was African” dance. Of those...

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