Urban Bush Women mesmerizes crowd

by Sarah Mirk

Roberts Theatre is packed with people--students in the center rows and out toward the edges, where a few seats linger unfilled, older professors and trustee look-alikes sit talking and paging through programs. It’s a diverse crowd, and a rowdy one. Everyone is waiting, excited, for the Urban Bush Women dance troupe to raise the curtain for their one-night performance, Thursday, Feb. 8, at Grinnell. Right on schedule, the theater goes black. Slowly, the light fades up in a single circle onstage, where a dancer stands wearing a wide-brim hat. The audience cannot see her face, but from the light falling from above on the well-defined muscles of her arms and legs, it is obvious that she is incredibly strong. And sexy. These are recurring themes in the night’s performance.

Urban Bush Women hails from Brooklyn, but the women who make up the creative team are from all over and all use the theatrical style of modern dance to explore and express different ideas. Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, the buff, grey-haired founding artistic director of the 22-year-old group (who also choreographed three of the four pieces performed on Thursday) was raised in Missouri. Her pieces ranged from the outrageous ode to butt-shaking, “Bati Moves” (Bati is a Caribbean word for buttocks), in which five dancers rapped about being proud of their large bodies and large attitudes, to the moving solo dance, “Give Your Hands to Struggle,” which mixed a slow traditional spiritual song with powerful body movements laden with overtones of African-American/female empowerment. In this latter piece, the dancer, the strikingly gorgeous Paloma McGregor, is dressed in flowing white. Her movements are smooth and fluid, but her every muscle – including her face – is tensed and she pushes through the air like it’s lead. Zollar, offstage, reads the names of influential African Americans, filling the theater with their sound. As she reads “Malcolm X,” Dénécy’s hand forms a fist, thrusting upwards into the light and then exploding into five fingers. The audience was silent, enraptured.


Each piece, in its own way, expressed the strength of the female body. In the opening piece of the night, where the first dancer wore that wide-brimmed hat, the dancers moved quickly through very difficult moves. Their costumes, which can only be described as safari-chic, revealed their rippling muscles as each body moved through arabesques, pirouettes and handsprings. When one dancer spun the entire length of the stage, sweat flew from her body across the light, reminding the audience just how rigorous the simple moves of modern dance can be.