Deep souls

Urban Bush Women and David Murray

by Marcia B. Siegel

My brain performed a temporary disconnect Friday night, suppressing the important information that the Urban Bush Women's curtain time at Northeastern University was 7:30 rather than the usual 8. So I lurched from the traffic jam on Huntington Avenue into a theater that was already rocking, somewhere in the first act of Jawole Willa Jo Zollar's Soul Deep. End of confession.

Produced by Northeastern Center for the Arts and Dance Umbrella, Soul Deep has music by David Murray and Michael Wimberly, but the piece is actually a collaboration between the Urban Bush Women and the David Murray Ensemble, with movement and music, songs, words, and shouts shared by all the performers. Even the sign-language interpreter, Jodi Steiner, was dancing beautifully, though she was relegated to a spot on the audience level, in front of the stage.

Soul Deep is divided into two parts, "Saturday Night" and "Sunday Mornin'," with "sections" and distinct numbers that have their own titles. The material doesn't carve out into separate choreographic blocks, so I'm not sure what I missed. Certain movement themes and lyrics were repeated and referred to throughout, and the whole piece ran together in a spirit of celebration roughly delineating the secular and the spiritual aspects of black culture.

Zollar spoke excerpts from Ntozake Shange's "I Live in Music" and Langston Hughes's "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"; and an evocative poem, "Sounds Fall Round Me," by Zollar and Wimberly, wove through the whole evening. "Saxophones wet my face," Zollar recited and Steiner signed.

Zollar seems to construct her movement style out of the diverse skills of her dancers, together with some Alvin Ailey-type extensions and generic portrayals: the bent-over shapes of sorrow; the hand-on-hip strut of the sexily confident woman; the punches and kicks of the street fighter. There were moments of choreographed unison, but most of the dancing looked individual, even when several people were on at the same time. With Murray's band as a rhythmic floor, the dance seemed almost improvised, as each dancer interpreted the music with his or her own energies and style.

The dance was like a big jazz work, all the dancers/speakers/singers taking solo initiatives and then stepping back into the ensemble, which in this case comprised the musicians as well. The band did have their own numbers, with Murray bebopping wildly on tenor sax, Hamiet Bluiett making the baritone sax screech up into falsetto register, Mark Johnson on drums, Jaribu Shahid on bass, Rasul Siddik on trumpet, James Spaulding on alto sax, and Donald Smith on keyboards. All of them were virtuosos, and all of them danced, too, whether they were just standing and blowing or weaving with their instruments through the dance scenes.

Each act ended with joyous dancing. The first act's "Jam" was a big-band samba party. In the second act, the dancers took up archetypal poses of labor, companionship, and hope. They sorrowed and consoled one another to Smith's gospel song "I don't know what I would do without my Lord," and from there the religious fever built into a revival.

On the surface, Soul Deep seemed to be only an exposition of funky and ecstatic dancing, sorrow, praise, salvation, and poetic portrayals of familiar types. But eventually I began to think of the work as an extended ritual that has to go through a series of climactic moments, from which it recedes, recuperates, and builds again. Once achieved, the process brings some catharsis to the community. When Stephanie Battle's solo of pain and longing escalated to a mass stomping, hollering affirmation, the audience joined in willingly.

Zollar and Murray have another collaborative piece, C-Sharp Street -- B-Flat Avenue, coming up during the Alvin Ailey season, the last week in April at the Wang Theatre.