Beauty is Beauty, Truth is Truth

Village Voice

By Elizabeth Zimmer

May 25, 1993

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and David Parsons both grew up in Kansas City, but there all resemblance ends. Zollar is an African American griot, a young matriarch whose clan increases everywhere she goes: she’s a spellbinder who uses all the resources of Diaspora black tradition to transform and teach, to imbue us with rhythms and visions, to share her joy and her pain.

David Parsons is younger, pale, and fair, a Paul Taylor alumnus whose beauty is part of his currency, and who creates dances designed to display virtuosity, to recall the Keatsian equation of truth and beauty that makes most of us liars. If muscular beauty is truth, these dances tip the scales of justice, but if you seek an intelligible connection to wisdom, vision, history, and the future when you enter a theatre, better to seek out Zollar and the Urban Bush Women.

An evening with the Urban Bush Women has the immediacy and resonance of a gospel service. All the music is live (and you sometimes have to wait for the musicians). Zollar and her band of passionate young performers forge their art from the material of their ancestors, from the religious rituals and street games of generation of African Americans. Parson and his people want to make you happy; Zollar and hers want to make you understand. The UBW offered two programs, a night-time bill including two works in progress, and a Sunday matinee that enfolded dancers from around the city in I Don’t know, But I been Told If You Keep On Dancing You’ll Never Grow Old, a work based on street dance forms and playground chants.

LifeDance III....The Empress (Womb Wars) is something of a departure for Zollar, a dramatic monologue by candlelight in which she speaks in her own voice, telling stories of her own birth and that of her daughter, the child she gave up for adoption 23 years ago. These tales emerge from a feminist consciousness shaped by generations of the systematic devaluation of women, by cultures in which the birth of a daughter is greeted with dismay or worse. They are set on, under, and at a red table, winding around a series of phone conversations with a friend who needs an abortion: Zollar acknowledges that the embryo is a spirit whose "right to be here" must be weighed against a woman’s right "to help it leave". Her text is polemic as well as confession, a powerful testament juxtaposed against a dance by a naked woman in obvious pain, accompanied on drums by Junior "Gabu" Wedderburn.

Nyabinghi Dreamtime, also candlelit, is more intensely musical, featuring Ancient Vibrations, a percussion ensemble playing Wedderburn’s score, and a vocal track composed by the company that include traditional songs from the Revival, Kumina, and Rastafarian cultures. It also intensely private, a ritual designed to invoke a sacred presence. Its intent is not to please the audience, but to be worthy of intervention by the gods. When her ensemble - Terri Cousar, Maia Claire Garrison, Christine King, Trava Offutt, E. Gaynell Sherrod, and Valerie Winbourne - dances, Zollar takes a graceful place in the back row, letting the others shine.

The really interesting thing about the two UBW performances I saw was the audience, full of African Americans who responded out loud, punctuating the testimony of Zollar and her troupe. Hardly passive consumers., they (and soon enough for the rest of us) were involved in a fortifying process, witnesses to transformation.

Sunday’s show was lighter in spirit, a jam session for the UBW and other performers including tap legion C. Scoby Stroman doing his sand dance, singer Jeanne Lee, the Ring-a-Belles ( a troupe of female Morris Dancer), and three women exhibiting different styles of movement: a body builder, a go-go dancer, and a traditional African dancer. Interspersed with their turns were the several sections of Zollar’s Keep on Dancing choreography, derived from double dutch, stepping, and the unison chants that keep African American oral tradition alive on present-day streets. Her 1989 work demonstrates that dancing is of, for, and by the people; hauled out of our seats to join the performers on stage, we found it a most natural place to be.