Urban Bush Women: Twenty Years of African American Dance Theater, Community Engagement, and Working it Out (review)

Founded in 1984 by artistic director Jawole Willa Jo Zollar in New York City, the performance group Urban Bush Women is the focus of Nadine George-Graves's important contribution to the field of African American dance studies. Originally consisting of seven black female dancers over age 30, Urban Bush Women continues to use the medium of dance to challenge the dominant white culture's construction of African American identity (and African American women's identity, in particular). Thus an important early value of the company was to engage its core communities by "creat[ing] dances that showed how African Americans perform themselves" (11). Similar to past studies, such as Ananya Chatterjea's Butting Out: Reading Resistive Choreographies through Works by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Chandralekha (2004), George-Graves's book establishes the company's repertoire as culturally resistive. It breaks new ground, however, by drawing upon resources like original interviews, reviews, photographs, and George-Graves's own attendance at rehearsals and performances to document the complexity and significance of Urban Bush Women's repertoire. Situating Urban Bush Women as an important model of womanism, as defined by Alice Walker in the early 1980s, George-Graves identifies the group's repertoire as therapeutic, critically evaluating the company's commitment to audience engagement, the performance process, and the healing power of performance.

George-Graves provides several examples of performances that led to healing. For example, dancer Vanessa Manley recalls in an interview the experience of a balding female audience member, a chemotherapy patient, who was so inspired by Hair Stories that, during the post-show discussion, she took off her wig and confessed that she didn't know why she was conforming to others' expectations of female beauty. Afterwards, the woman's daughter, who was also in attendance, hugged her mother and "told her that she was proud of her" (204). Hair Stories empowered this audience member not only to accept her body, but also to testify to others of her transformative experience.

George-Graves contends that Urban Bush Women's performances not only are "unapologetic, provocative, and ultimately healing," but also politically engaging (4). As the subtitle of the book suggests, she centers her scholarship on the concept of "working," arguing that Urban Bush Women's dances "attend to the bodies and souls of individuals and communities," and that healing occurs when "one works the roots, works the body, works the soul, works the tangles out" (4). Audiences are able to experience moments of healing when they both internalize provocative performance material to work on the inner self, and externalize those lessons by returning to their communities to "effect social change" (6). By using choreography to demonstrate the fluidity of racial identities, for example, Urban Bush Women "challenge their audiences to reimagine society and renounce old definitions of black dance, and indeed, black identity" (6).

Urban Bush Women's performances also challenge audience expectations of dance. Incorporating a variety of choreographic styles, including West African dance, ballet, and modern dance, Urban Bush Women performances resist fixed categorization. In addition, the company's dancers play instruments, read poetry, and utilize other performance techniques, such as singing and acting. George-Graves notes, in fact, that "[m]any of the pieces require the dancers to create believable characters and deliver lines loudly enough to be heard over several booming drums" (29). While performing to the accompaniment of music, Urban Bush Women seeks to provoke its audiences, directly addressing them with its "emotionally charged" pieces in order to incite audience participation (29). Although George-Graves acknowledges that the company's provocative performances may be off-putting to some audience members, she argues that "what some find threatening is precisely the kind of stakes-raising necessary to create empowerment and effect change" (7).

Among the strengths of the book are the detailed...