Hot mamas

Urban Bush Women shake it

by Marcia B. Siegel

High-powered dancing by Urban Bush Women raised the roof at Blackman Auditorium last Saturday night, in a fervent climax to the two-week Artstuff festival sponsored by Northeastern's Center for the Arts. High-school students from the Boston area participated in workshops given by artists in theater, music, visual arts, and dance, with several public performances and a film series during the second week.

Based in New York, Urban Bush Women under director Jawole Willa Jo Zollar combine dancing, singing, and storytelling in an eclectic fusion of African-American traditions. Their stated mission is to effect social change, and their style owes a lot to the idealistic game plans of revivalism, therapy, and social work, but the program on Saturday night was surprisingly free of preachiness or cajolery. The audience was won over by the tremendous physicality and attitude of the dancers.

All four pieces (two of them were actually excerpted from longer works) had the episodic structure of street and community dance. A vibrant ensemble sustained the group during outbursts of individual virtuosity or temperament. UBW's musical director, Michael Wimberly, played drums and supplied other support throughout the concert, lifting the excitement level in the flashier parts and creating quiet atmospheres when the mood got serious.

Dances are held together by a particular theme or pretext around which variations can utilize the talents of each group member. This plan makes room for improvisational solos and a certain amount of good-natured competitiveness while also allowing the group to make adaptations or cuts as the situation requires. It puts a lot of responsibility on the individual dancers, and though I couldn't tell them by name, each woman made a very distinct impression.

After I Live in Music, to a text by Ntozake Shange, which was mostly singing in rhythmic harmony with solo and duet riffs, Girlfriends, a short excerpt from one of UBW's signature pieces, Anarchy, Wild Women, and Dinah, showed off the personalities of four of the dancers to the max. Dressed in night clothes, they might have been sisters or dorm mates. In huge, exaggerated mime, they primped and argued and embraced in laughter. One woman seemed to have a spasm of pain or sorrow; the others tried to comfort her in their own ways: one sympathetic, one bossy, one hesitant. Later the sympathetic woman took off her blue terry-cloth bathrobe to display a black tutu with red ruffles, tassels, and pompons -- a burlesque queen's nightmare. She did a hilarious dance to match, oscillating between embarrassment and flamboyance.

In a similar vein was Batty Moves, a celebration of "the most beautiful and expressive part of the body," the backside. Not that the batty (a word from the West Indies, perhaps related to booty) doesn't move in other dances. But here it was the whole point. Each woman had a T-shirt wrapped around her waist so we'd be sure to see the virtuosic ways all of them could shake their batty, grind it, thrust it out to the side, pop it, swivel it. There was a lot of African movement, as well as bits of capoeira, cha-cha, hip-hop, and an accelerating group formation that started out with classroom pliés -- backsides to the audience, of course -- and ended with vibrations so fast they were almost blurred.

In Transitions, the women's voices were heard on tape talking about their religious experience. Originally made for Ballet Arizona in 1997, this was the most formally choreographed work on the program, and to me the most interesting from a movement point of view. Two women began it with strong, large moves. Expelling their breath audibly, they worked up to effortful throws and lunges. It seemed that the breath sounds, which can be distracting in a dance, were an intentional part of the score. One section featured a taped chorus of glottal sounds pushed out in rhythmic patterns as a trio of women jumped and kicked at the air. In another part, voices whispered a chorus based on the word "surrender." With the drummer nudging up the ante, the six dancers later whirled and shook ecstatically as the audience shrieked.

We never see women move so forcefully and surely in today's dance. UBW reminded me of the way people describe Martha Graham's all-female company of the 1930s. The whole evening was a kind of answer to the all-male hip-hop and body-rhythm dance companies that are so popular, but Transitions grounded and reinforced the entertainment with the expressive and visionary power of early modern dance.