This post was written by UMS 21st Century Intern Grace Bydalek.

On January 12th, 2018, UMS rang in the new year with a performance of Urban Bush Women’s Hair and Other Stories in the Power Center for the Performing Arts. Urban Bush Women’s work focuses on text with the history, culture, and spiritual traditions of African Americans and the African diaspora. Artistic Director Jawole Zollar weaves together the boundary-pushing non-linear stories through dance, music, and spoken word.

Hair and Other Stories was crafted through interviews and other personal narratives, highlighting the struggles and complexities of our current world and times ahead. Original compositions by The Illustrious Blacks underscore dynamic movement and storytelling about gender identity, economic inequalities, body concept, race, freedom, liberation, and release in this extraordinary time.

Faculty across a variety of schools at the University of Michigan chose to integrate this engaging performance into their syllabi, exposing their students to the world of performance art and modern dance. Below, some of these faculty discuss the impact of Hair and Other Stories on their courses and students.

Photo: Urban Bush Women. Courtesy of artist.

            Clare Croft brought the students in her course Dancing Women/Dancing Queer to the performance of Hair and Other Stories. The students had been prepared for the performance over the duration of the semester. Croft explains, “The students read portions of dance scholar Nadine George-Graves book on Urban Bush Women, did class exercises focused on movement description, and then attended the performance as their first step in their performance analysis paper. For the paper, students had to take notes on the physical, material details of the performance; and then write a paper in which they described a significant moment in the performance, contextualize that moment in the performance as a whole, and then discuss how that moment raised questions about gender and sexuality.”

Croft observed her students’ curiosity and increased engagement in the course after the performance. They were, as she describes it, “struck by the overt discussion of race and gender, which some thought was moving and some thought demonstrated a lack of trust in dance’s ability to make meaning.”

            Petra Kuppers exposed her undergraduate students in Health, Gender and Performance, a course run as a collaboration between LSA’s Women’s Studies and the Theatre Department. In the class following the performance, Kuppers and her students created their own movement material from their “body histories,” inspired by Urban Bush Women’s physical movements.
“We used the theme of ‘everyday rituals,’ and students wove performances of worship and communal meals together with moments of private movement, abstract patterns that held memories for them, and that they shared with and taught to their co-performers,” Kuppers explains.  She immediately observed a change in the way that her students, many of them pre-medical, engaged in the course material. “As it was early on in our course, this was the first time the students performed for each other, and it was a pleasure to see the energy and delight unlocked by seeing and then engaging dance work together,” Kuppers states.

Photo: Urban Bush Women. Courtesy of artist.

Joel Howell’s Medical Arts Program focuses on the benefit of the arts on medical practice, and is done in cooperation with the medical school Office for Health Equity and Inclusion. Given the nature of the program at hand, Howell did not do any specific preparation for the performance in his course, save for a lively discussion with Jawole Zollar. They discussed the piece at large, and about racial disparities in medical treatments and outcomes. “I think the conversation with Jawole Zollar before the show was the most valuable part of the evening,” a medical student stated. “Not only did it help contextualize the show and highlight some of the intent behind the pieces, but it also helped draw connections between art, especially dance, and how we as physicians move through the world.”

After each performance, he asks his students to provide him with feedback. The connections between Hair and Other Stories and the medical world abounded. “We talked a lot about being truly present in a moment when communicating with someone and ways to consent to and properly end a shared experience no matter how big or small,” one student observed. “We also discussed the concept of autonomy and asking for permission to enter a shared, intimate space with another person. Both of these things are essential components to a positive patient encounter.”

This essay is published in conjunction with FRAME: A salon series on visual art, performance, and identity surrounding the No Safety Net Series theater festival performances. The U-M Institute for the Humanities and UMS will offer  two more open dialogues around contemporary visual art, performance, and identity on Monday, February 19 and Monday, March 19 at 7 PM in the Atrium at 202 South Thayer Building in Ann Arbor.

“Disrupting the FRAME” is written by Angela G. King. King is a writer, filmmaker, and actress. Her most recent endeavors include “The Girl Who Wasn’t There,” a memoir of human trafficking that she’s helping one young West African woman to share.

Getting a glimpse into the heavily-shrouded quandary that we African-American women have had with our hair throughout time. And coming face to face, of a sort, with 73 civilians – 72 men and one woman – who were killed over four days in the 2010 drug war in Kingston, Jamaica, known as the “Tivoli Incursion.”

Such was the impetus of the first of a three-part series of public discussions being held at the University of Michigan that examine how contemporary art, be it exhibited or performed, can challenge the very framework of social conventions.

“These kind of disruptions can be groundbreaking,” summed up Detroit native Taylor Renee Aldridge. “We need to have these dialogues.”

Of burgeoning prominence as an art critic, curator and co-founder of the ARTS.BLACK online journal, Aldrige was speaking before a diverse gathering of some 30 attendees who filled the atrium of the 202 South Thayer Building last Monday evening. There, in this site of the U-M Institute for the Humanities, educator and contemporary dancer and choreographer Jennifer Harge joined her in helming the exchange. As did Jillian Walker, a U-M alumna like Harge, who’s taking time out from an award-winning career in New York writing plays to draft her latest script back here in her home region as a resident artist with the University Musical Society. Michael Awkward, the Gayl A. Jones Professor of Afro-American Literature and Culture at U-M, was also on hand as a key speaker.

Aldrige, Harge, Walker and Awkward were brought together by the university and UMS, the independent performing arts group housed among the downtown Ann Arbor hub of this sprawling, venerated center for higher learning. Their casual but decisive conversation kicked off “FRAME: A salon series on visual art, performance, and identity” that’s slated to reconvene on February 19 and March 19.

“Amanda Krugliak, who is the curator at the U-M Institute for the Humanities, and I had noticed that many of our artistic projects were in dialogue with each other,” explained Jim Leija, the director of education and community engagement for UMS.

“For some time now, we’ve wanted to build that implied dialogue into something more explicit and intentional,” he elaborated. “The notion of an informal salon surfaced as a counterpoint to the many academic platforms that already exist in our most immediate university community in Ann Arbor. This year in particular, our institutions are both presenting shows that are dealing quite explicitly with questions of identity, and even more specifically with race.”

The all-black cast of creative professionals who launched the FRAME series speaking with assorted guests on Jan. 22 about the show from the current UMS season and exhibit they attended together embody what Leija began seeking out for these dialogues this

Photo: Urban Bush Women. Courtesy of artist.

past summer – diversity. And their commentary ranged from the discomfort that Taylor and Harge articulated about some of the expressly cultural lingo included in “Hair & Other Stories,” the interpretive performance brought to Ann Arbor by the Urban Bush Women on Jan. 12. To the sense of empowerment Walker, in contrast, shared that she gleaned from her account of the rare showcase of African American vitality presented by this Brooklyn-based company dedicated to melding artistic expression with community engagement to promote social justice.

“I took this as an opportunity to be seen with other black women,” Walker said of an evening of music, movement and declaration that literally brought her to her feet. Brought her to her feet among a multiracial crowd that packed the more than 1,200-seat theater in the U-M’s towering, mirror-encased Power Center for the Performing Arts.

The Ann Arbor performance kicked off a 14-city tour through April for the Urban Bush Women. And the company was true to its internationally recognized penchant for weaving contemporary dance, music and text – accentuated by strobe lights and haze at the Power Center – to defy boundaries in sharing the gamut of the African-American experience with people of all backgrounds. An ambition that wasn’t lost on any of the speakers at the ensuing first FRAME discussion. But one that certainly wasn’t universally received, either.

“I was really taken by the physicality of the performance, so much so that I could have done without the didactics,” admitted Aldridge. She, like Harge, took exception to the liberal mention of “naps” and “kitchens” – hair vernacular long rooted strictly among black folks – during the event.

“I felt like I was having a family discussion in mixed company,” Harge added. “I felt exposed.”

And Harge, a lecturer at both U-M and Oakland University, is no stranger to mining the African American experience – from protest movements to hip hop – to help strengthen community engagement and promote social change. Trained in modern dance, with a

Jennifer Harge teaching with Harge Dance Stories. Photo by Carlos Funn.

master’s degree from the University of Iowa as a Dean’s Graduate Fellow, and a bachelor’s from U-M, she has run a Detroit-based performance collective called Harge Dance Stories for the past four years.

Yet it was the ambivalence of Harge and others to what the Urban Bush Women conveyed onstage in this area most recently that had Awkward zero in on the disparity that can result from exposing some of the darkest secrets of black hair. Beyond the black community.

“Part of the performance was like letting out a nappy secret about the preparation that needs to go into black hair in order to be seen as what’s considered presentable,” he surmised at last week’s FRAME discussion. “Then they turned the lights up in the audience [at one point], so we were as visible as they were on stage.”

An apparent moment of vulnerability that never surfaced the next afternoon, in Detroit, at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. That’s where Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, who founded the Urban Bush Women in 1984, took some of her dancers from the Ann Arbor performance to host a community workshop delving into the historical connection between hair, social consciousness and dance among African Americans. The rest of her troupe that had traveled here to Metro Detroit with her from their Brooklyn creative base conducted the workshop at the Ann Arbor YMCA that same day.

With the gallery space at the Wright Museum where this event took place cleared of any seating, the dozens of people who showed up, many with children in tow, found themselves on foot the entire time. And doing their best to keep up as Zollar and company led them in doing the Stroll, the Twist, the Jerk and other vintage moves.

She didn’t avoid any of the hair terminology that her dancers had bandied onstage in Ann Arbor, either. Yet contrary to any of the varied audience reaction from the previous day, the spirited, diminutive 67-year-old managed to provoke quite a few wistful smiles among her exclusively African American audience.

When all was said and done, the occasion turned out to be quite family-centric, made all the more so with Aminata, the not quite 2-year-old daughter of Urban Bush Women dancer and associate artistic director, Samantha Speis. Having performed with Speis and her colleagues in Ann Arbor, Aminata was with them at The Wright as well to participate with the Urban Bush Women.

Photo: Urban Bush Women. Courtesy of artist.

Alongside local mother and wife Sherita Gosha-Williams during this occasion were her daughters, 13-year-old Jaylah and 9-year-old Siana.

“It was important to me to bring my daughters, very important,” Gosha-Williams, whose husband and 4-year-old son were back home in Lenox Township, said while flanked at The Wright by her other two children. “Being that our culture is not often promoted positively in the media, I wanted them to know the foundation and beauty of our hair.”

Her mission speaks volumes about the possibilities of a better future for children of color. Far better, hopefully, than the one that was snatched from the black men, and one woman at the hands of their own people during the Tivoli Incursion.  Tucked away in a small gallery at the front of the Institute for the Humanities atrium where last week’s FRAME session transpired, the mixed-media vision of Kingston-born artist, Ebony G. Patterson, brings this still-haunting massacre into glaring view until Feb. 9.

Known as “The Of 72 Project,” Patterson employed fabric, digital pictures, embroidery, rhinestones, trimmings, bandanas and floral appliques once again to offer commentary on the United States’ bid to extradite a Jamaican drug lord named Christopher “Dudus” Coke. It was a demand that plunged Kingston under a state of emergency in May 2010 as Jamaica’s military and police forces battled Coke’s Shower Posse cartel, leaving dozens of individuals dead whose identities remain a mystery to this day.

And, according to Awkward, author of six books probing race and gender representations in 20th and 21st century black American expressive culture, a calamity that parallels what it can mean to be black and meet a violent, untimely end in the U.S. Namely, in the frustration over crucial truths concerning the lives and deaths of these people that remain elusive, elaborated Awkward, who’s now writing a book on Emmett Till and other black American boys famously murdered or psychologically mangled since him.

“It’s the same story, the fear of the other, and the desire to obtain power over the other,” asserted George Shirley, 83-year-old emeritus professor of the U-M School of Music who attended last week’s  FRAME discussion.

More like a narrative in overcoming that fear to break down barriers among people that’s given more lip service than anything else, to hear 19-year-old Lanae Jefferson tell it. Even at a long-regarded progressive institution like U-M, where she’s a sophomore.

“I don’t like how the university likes to say we’re so diverse, and I don’t see the diversity,” Jefferson, also there at the FRAME dialogue, charged. “Personally, I don’t feel comfortable on this campus. It’s very large and has many cliques”

Which raises the question of how to get more students “who really need to be there out to the many UMS performances about diversity and inclusion [on campus],” according to the Southfield native who’s interested in art history.

Her sentiment magnifies the challenge facing UMS and the U-M Institute for the Humanities, with two open FRAME discussions that Aldridge and Harge will host remaining, in moving forward in their mission. That is, Leija reiterated, “to bring a diverse group of people together to explore how visual art and performance can be used as a tool for disrupting the status quo and building a different culture and reality for all of us.”

And while talk alone isn’t tantamount to bringing about actual change, Aldridge pointed out, “Having cross-cultural dialogues about marginalization and our respective differences and attributes is necessary to upending the status quo of patriarchal white supremacy and white-centered gazes in art-making. It has the potential to foster change, and to consider how we perpetuate these gazes.”

This essay is published in conjunction with FRAME: A salon series on visual art, performance, and identity surrounding the No Safety Net Series theater festival performances. The U-M Institute for the Humanities and UMS will offer  two more open dialogues around contemporary visual art, performance, and identity on Monday, February 19 and Monday, March 19 at 7 PM in the Atrium at 202 South Thayer Building in Ann Arbor.

 “Disrupting the FRAME” is written by Angela G. King. King is a writer, filmmaker, and actress. Her most recent endeavors include “The Girl Who Wasn’t There,” a memoir of human trafficking that she’s helping one young West African woman to share.

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In this video, 21st Century Intern Johnny Mathews shares his experience with Urban Bush Women in New York City, which UMS presents in January, 2018.

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Pictured: students at a January dance performance with Igor & Moreno that surprised and delighted audiences.

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This post is part of a series of posts by students who are part of our 21st Century Student Internship program. As part of the paid internship program, students spend several weeks with a company that’s on the UMS season.

U-M student Johnny Mathews was paired with Urban Bush Women in Summer 2017. Urban Bush Women perform in Ann Arbor on January 12, 2018.

Photos: Group photo of all Urban Bush Women’s Student Leadership Institute (SLI) participants at the end of the Culminating Performance

This summer, thanks to UMS’s 21st Century Artist Internship program, I was able to spend two months in New York City and had experiences that surely changed my life in known and unknown ways. I was placed within, 33-year-old dance company, Urban Bush Women (UBW), a Brooklyn-based dance company dedicated to sharing stories of the African diaspora and committed to enacting social change through dance and workshops. Most of my time with the company was focused on preparing for UBW’s Summer Leadership Institute (SLI). I assisted in administrative work to help the administrative staff as they readied all that goes into having a long workshop for over one hundred participants and staff.

This ten-day intensive program was entitled: You, Me, We – Understanding Internalized Racial Oppression and How It Manifests in Our Artistic Community. SLI consisted of dance classes that was accessible for every body–type, size, ability– to do and be involved in. These dance classes were used as ways to share different African-American dance traditions, such as the ring-shout, the Second Line, and J-Setting. Dance was just a small portion of the day, however. The first seven days of the program were focused on discussions about racism and how it manifests in our community, as well as how and what we can do as artists to help combat racism.

This first meant that we had to truly understand the systems and operations that have been in place in our country that have systematically oppressed marginalized communities. These workshops were led by an organization that works to undermine racism in communities around the country: The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISAB). I learned so much from these workshops, and my frame of reference was completely shifted with respect to how I think and talk about racism in America. I still find myself processing a lot of the information that was presented and discussed to this day.  

Photos: On left, Vincent Thomas passionately leading class at SLI. On right, volunteers who helped with Black Velvet Fundraising Performance Art Event at the 14th St Y.

For the last few days of the program, the focus shifted to actually creating a culminating performance that would be presented to an audience. The way this was created was really special and something that I had never been a part of before. Instead of having one leader or creator heading the creative process, the show was created very democratically. It started with the entire community coming together and sharing what they bring to the table; whether it be music, singing, theatre, poetry, sound and light design, dance, etc. Then the performance was created by the people and allowed for everyone to showcase their best talents and abilities. Seeing the entire community come together to build upon each other’s talents was inspiring and made me think about how this can be replicated in all aspects of art making.

Though this culminating performance seemed to be the culmination of my weeks of work, there was one more part of my internship: I was able to accompany the dance company on a four-day tour to Akron, Ohio. This was a truly immersive, educational experience. I was able to follow the co-artistic directors, the company members, the company manager, and the technical director as they traversed all that comes with a quick, one-stop tour. This tour was presented by the Heinz Poll Summer Dance Festival and was composed of two performances, a master class, and a post-show talk back. Something really interesting to see was how adaptable everyone had to be on this tour.

UBW was performing excerpts from Walking with Trane and portions of their 30th Anniversary Collage, two works that the company was not currently working on. Therefore, the dancers had only one or two rehearsals together in Akron to put these works back together. Not only were they putting it together, but they were rearranging the works while we were there, with everyone adapting to the changes perfectly. I was allowed an insider’s look into how a world-class dance company interacts with a presenter, a new community, and each other.

Photos:  On left, John Mathews pictured with the New York skyline from the beaches in DUMBO, Brooklyn. On right, participating in Sidra Bell’s Summer Module 2017. 

I grew so much as a person by being an intern with UBW. Not only from all the work I put in for the company and the insights I gained, but also because I was able to live in New York City for two months and was afforded opportunities that I would never have been able to have otherwise. While I was in the city, I attended Sidra Bell’s Summer Module, a week-long dance intensive that connected me with a community of New York based dancers; I saw so many different kinds of performances, such as Dearest Home by Abraham in Motion, Onegin by American Ballet Theatre, Hamilton, and many more; I assisted Shamel Pitts and Mirelle Martins in a fundraising event for their world tour of Black Velvet; and I was simply able to feel settled in while living in New York City. I had a summer immersed in all facets of the art-making process and am so grateful to UMS for the opportunity.

See Urban Bush Women on January 12, 2018.