Subversive Dancing: The Interventions in Jawole Willa Jo Zollar's Batty Moves

This essay analyzes the movement vocabulary and choreographic structure of Batty Moves, a piece created by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and performed by her company, Urban Bush Women, in order to suggest how the dancing bodies here comment on history and rewrite current cultural stereotypes. It focuses specifically on how the dancers, manipulating typical movement phrases from ballet, modern dance, and African-based movement, negotiate an aesthetic-cultural framework that critiques the fetishization of the black female body while enabling reclamations of black female sexuality.