Skip to main contentNew York's Urban Bush Women are just too much.
Seven flesh and blood (and booty) women who move, chant and speak in a tone more likely found in your neighbor's cousin's sister's kitchen than on a stage. The ease and physical explosions culled from the bodies of these African-American women allow them not only to avoid artifice but to wholly obliterate the notion that what you're watching are rehearsed performances.
Headed up by artistic director and choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, the group has been delivering its whip-smart messages on homelessness, social consciousness, and the female African-American experience since its 1984 inception, capturing an indefinable quality of vital motion and history that continues to infuse its work today. And then there's the dancing: a simmering stockpot of African, street, hip-hop and even childhood double Dutch stretched tight over a prudent framework of modern technique.
Highly aware and deadly funny, whether playing clown, temptress or chorus, the ferocity of Zollar's choreography is uplifting. For certain, UBW's humor and entertaining wiles draw the audience into its layered works. But bottom line, it is the women's very personal politics that keeps those same watchers engaged and thinking after the performance ends.
In Batty Moves (1995) the women strut and preen, singing odes to their backsides with defiant words of praise and delight. In 2000, the troupe's Soul Deep found the whole company funking out to a live jazz band, the women's mind-boggling jumps stretching and snapping like rubber bands, their repetitive leaps shifting weight and motion into a level of physicality and joy generally unknown by mere mortals.
Zollar's latest Afro puff-cum-political manifesto, HairStories should be no different. A self-styled "stage documentary," the evening-length work takes on the myth and mystique of nappy hair with Urban Bush Women's vibrant weave of dance, song and major attitude--to the yowl of James Brown and Parliament Funkadelic, no less.
Directed by Elizabeth Herron, the work was inspired by Zollar and company's own life experiences with the politics of hair as well as work by artists like writer and performance poet hattie gossett and recent Portland Institute for Contemporary Art performer Carl Hancock Rux.
The new performance genre mixes the group's phenomenal bursts of movement with a cappella voice, loopy character monologues and hair-centric documentary-style interviews Zollar has collected since 1995. The buzz from lucky audiences already blessed with the chance to witness HairStories' Jacob's Pillow premiere last August seems to confirm that the work is a continuation of Zollar's quest to explore the sudden delights and utter defeats of the female experience--news that should be both a relief and an exciting prospect for the nappy-haired, straight-locked and bald-headed alike.
White Bird at Lincoln Hall Auditorium, Portland State University, 1620 SW Park Ave., 245-1600. 8 pm Thursday- Saturday, Dec. 13-15. $24.
WWeek 2015