Review Reviews: Urban Bush Women

The Hopkins Center for the Arts started off the new year by welcoming back Urban Bush Women, the only professional African-American women’s dance-theater company in the country. 

Urban Bush Women returned to Dartmouth after a residency at the Hopkins Center last autumn. Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, a 2021 MacArthur Genius Fellow, founded the company in Brooklyn in 1984. For decades since, Urban Bush Women has electrified audiences with performances that blend dance, instrumental music, and theater to express black, woman-centered perspectives and catalyze social change.

Urban Bush Women performed “Haint Blu,” which the company created while in residence at the College last fall. Dartmouth students who were involved in the Shabazz Center for Intellectual Inquiry offered input throughout the performance’s development. “Haint Blu” refers to a shade of pale blue-green with which black Americans in the southern United States, particularly the Gullah, painted their porches, doors, and shutters in order to ward off evil spirits. “Haint Blu” is the latest work in Urban Bush Women’s “Legacy + Lineage + Liberation” tour, which celebrates the power, resistance, and resilience of women of color.

Three staff members of The Dartmouth Review entered the Bush. Here is the fragmented record of their journey.

I

The aged man shivers in his frock, tweed pants damp at the hem; it is slop outside, and his shoes they did clop clop down the sidewalk in their weathered brown nicety; the leather fumes reactivate in the rain, would have killed for them, would have died for them else-wise, but all he needed was a few labor-hours exchanged by his wrinkled hands. The aged man does not watch movies, has not watched a move in years; he tells his wife over the telephone after wrapping up geometry, want to go see a movie? go to the movies? and then he sits and folds his wrinkled hands and spills the popcorn all over the floor and creates a job. The aged man asks have you read this? before the show, whispering between the local ads, have you read this book? have you read this article? did you know this and that? and his excitement bubbles into mindless chatter as he raves, as he waxes poetic, and isn’t this just exciting? how I love the theater! he says as he feels the creep of boyhood. The aged man sees the opening of the film as a flash in the pan that is him and he sleeps.

I am the aged man.

I wince at my admittance; the Urban Bush Women deserve infinitely more respect than I have given them, being the established group that they are, with a celebrated 37 years of performance under their belts. Yet what am I to say? I see vividly the opening numbers, the percussionist base to the effusive superstructure of a routine, the blend of quite apparently technically advanced work by master craftsmen with the folklorish iotas of black playground culture, the character voiced by each dancer in her movements that meant the routine could be performed by no others, that it was wholly unique, and this all in the first few minutes.

But my mind is weak. In a theater, any theater, once the lights go out, it is only a matter of time before I’m asleep; I couldn’t explain it, except for perhaps the greater manifestation of what the adults in my life once called my “old soul.” I could only review, after the opening few numbers, the drum lines of the Urban Bush Women as they appeared in my dreams, which, incidentally, were as strange as one might expect.

II

A drummer emerged from the Bush. A lone woman wielding a spear-like cane laid in waiting. At the first beat of the drum, she was on the prowl. The dancer was clad in a light blue, cropped, sleeveless hoodie and shorts, reminiscent of urban streetwear in summertime. But her movements were those of the Bush—not the city. Guided by the drumbeat, she strutted, martial and dominating. With her shoulders held squarely, she stomped across the stage like a predator on the hunt. Her muscles bulged; her legs snapped into a sprint, then stopped sharply; she pivoted into a lunge with her spear outstretched, thrusting into and piercing some unseen prey. She was, simply, marvelous.

The dancer’s mastery of such standardly masculine movements expressed a feminine prowess of an unusually violent character. This effect was amplified by adding in five other dancers towards the end of the act. As the other dancers joined the performance, they synchronized in a way that resembled marching but that still retained particular hints of the wildness of the lone dancer’s performance that preceded. The resulting movements once again feminized masculine aggression, fusing together into a grand display of blurred contrasts that rendered the power, valor, and individuality of the black, female spirit.

III

The Urban Bush situates itself between the forceful, linear rhythm that is time and the chaotic rhizome of space. As my ears and heart immersed themselves in the pounding of the drums and hi-hat, my cells sought freedom from their soma, seeking the same feeling encapsulated by the dancers’ flow. Otherwise, I spent the rest of the show on two more enjoyable tasks: laughing at a stereotypical white bourgeois audience—who jeered and awed mechanically in the face of a performance so exotic that they were forced to fetishize it; and arguing with a fascist usher who took her job a little too seriously.

I honestly can’t say too much about this performance. What I can say is that the Urban Bush Women were entertaining in their own unique way. While I can’t speak to intention, the elderly audience appeared enthralled by their dance moves—which I can’t detach from a commodity being consumed. They most definitely fulfilled their mission statement: “projecting the voices of the under-heard and people of color…bringing attention to and addressing issues of equity in the dance field and throughout the United States…providing platforms and serving as a conduit for culturally and socially relevant experimental art makers.” Nonetheless, the reception of their art was perplexing.

I could not make sense of the narrative or flow of “Haint Blu,” but I could keep up with the percussion ensemble. The drummer, who handled a diverse set of instruments including a marching snare, tambourine, and jazz drum set, deserves praise for her ability to maintain rhythm while navigating the changing sets. We were not so successful, resulting in the theater usher reprimanding us during a set change—which we believed to be intermission given the closing of the curtains and long period of silence—for attempting to reach our balcony seats.

IV

Beleaguered by their journey, our heroic Bush-goers sought refuge and libations in the usual spot for adventurers of their kind: Babes Bar in Bethel, Vermont.