Walking with UBW: An Interview with Chanon Judson by Tara Aisha Willis

This conversation is part of a series of writings by artists involved with UBW during the Choreographic Center’s incubation and development period. These articles are intended to influence the structure and design of the Center as it moves forward by interrogating some of its driving desires and themes.

The UBW Core Values: “Validating the Individual,” “Catalyzing for Social Change,” “Building Trust through Process,” “Entering Community and Co-Creating Stories,” “Celebrating the Movement and Culture of the African Diaspora,” and “Recognizing Place Matters.”

In January of 2016, the first UBW Choreographic Center Prototype workshop brought together an intergenerational group of fourteen choreographers to work with Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, as well as faculty members Nora Chipaumire and Nia Love to explore the needs of women of color choreographers and potential curricular directions for the Center. In this conversation, Associate Artistic Director and company dancer Chanon Judson reflects on how UBW’s Core Values influence its practices and processes, as much in rehearsals and on stage as UBW’s education and engagement initiative, BOLD (Builders, Organizers, & Leaders through Dance). For Judson, the new Choreographic Center will more clearly extend those Core Values and solidify two additional value sets that have always been a part of UBW: the importance of openness to change and evolution, and a commitment to life-long learning.

Chanon Judson: Jawole delivered the keynote for the Black Women in Dance: Stepping Out of the Barriers conference, produced by Serendipity in Leicester, UK in May, 2016. During the address, it was funny to hear her note that she has a high degree of patience for sitting in discomfort. It’s one of those things that—being inside the creative process—feels like the elephant in the room. There could be any number of reasons for discomfort in the space: because the task is daunting and we’re trying to chip away at it, or we’re brewing, we’re on the right track but can’t find the thing to really make it pop. To hear her say, “Yes, that’s actually part of the process!” made me think about the nuggets of gold I’ve uncovered after going through that period of discomfort. You stay in that period long enough and something different has to happen—not magically, but different choices have to be made. I recalled all the creative processes I’ve been in with her. That murky discomfort comes up all the time. It’s the phase that ushers in the risk factor, of breaking boundaries and pushing while not knowing exactly what’s going to happen next. You have to go through that to get to the gem on the other side.

TAW: It makes me wonder about the tool kit that UBW and Jawole are using in choreography, but also in the Summer Leadership Institute (SLI) and the Choreographic Center. There are things under the surface besides the Core Values that have to happen for the work—both inside and outside the studio—to happen.

CJ: We’re trying to pull away from the word “tools.” People come to SLI and want UBW to show them their tools for entering, building, and then exiting community. People come to classes and want to learn a tool for creating in this way or that. But we want to encourage the idea of being seeped in practices or methodologies. Learning that you live inside of and continue to brew over a period of time—a lifetime. It’s not a fixed thing: “If we could do A then it yields B”; but instead it’s a slew of practices that are interchangeable, that can be combined, modulated. That can happen for a long or short period of time; they’re not necessarily linear, but you draw from them as it necessary inside of the learning or creative process.

UBW’s BOLD training is practice based, drawing from the model of the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond: the facilitators are made ready for the field by consistently applying the methodology to their own efforts of organizing, educating, or creating. Artists don’t follow a how-to guide, but rather incorporate the values into their personal journey, allowing it to shape and shift their lens.

TAW: Are there other ways you see the studio practice or choreographic practice dovetailing with, running parallel to, or intersecting with these other initiatives?

CJ: The SLI facilitates the critical study of community, beginning with examining oneself—the body as our first home, our first community. The process is revelatory, unearthing, and at times, destabilizing. It takes courage and vulnerability, the kind that makes your whole body warm, to be willing to learn things you thought you already knew: “No, I can push further.” To support this learning, UBW very intentionally constructs a safe space for learning (falling down, questioning) and encourages participants to honor a notion of truth that validates their own experience while allowing space for others. This system of support, respect, validation, and community is imperative to the learning environment. Building trust through process, so everyone can take two steps further, knowing you not walking it alone.

These values and the systems that shape them run deep inside all of UBW’s work.  

Coupled with our Core Values is a willingness to be malleable. Change is interwoven into our methodology. I mean “change” in the sense that we’re constantly embracing information that serves the work. I joined in 2001, toured for about 5 years, and then came off the road. I remember coming back to company class and being a little taken aback, thinking, “What is happening? I don’t recognize this?” There was a new group of creators and the work was growing—not just shifting because, “Oh, there’re new people, so we’ll do new things,” but they were all bringing different sets of expertise. The company embraced the deepening of that learning, and now we’re in the midst of another cycle of that. Now we’re thinking about new information on the science of the body, enhancing sustainability for the muscles and joints, the dancer in longevity—that becomes part of the company practice.

TAW: So change over time... Adaptability...

CJ: I know I used the word “change,” but I want to use the word “evolve.” There’s attention in it. It’s not haphazard. It’s not, “The wind has shifted so I want to do this new thing.” It’s that new information or expertise has come and there’s a new goal at hand, so now we evolve.

TAW: Can you talk about your experience over your decade and a half of dancing with UBW? How that trajectory has evolved and shifted around those processes and practices of the Core Values?

CJ: We just had the Cultural Traditions Residency at Jacob’s Pillow [in June 2016]. In the archives there they have old UBW repertoire, first company repertory I had never seen before. One thing that struck me was how strong the seed of the vision was. You could put your finger on the Core Values. The use of the sciences of the African diaspora, risk, courage, individuality, choice, all were in the early work. I saw the company mining their traditions of double dutch, hand jive games, and marching band experiences. Examining the root, “their mother tongues.” Feeling so much in relationship with that work myself made me realize how strong the bedrock of the company is.

What I’m noticing now is not so much the way the company has evolved but the way that I’ve grown over fifteen years. I came into the company as the baby in the group; learning in a shared ecosystem. I remember seeing the different choices the women that were my elders made. I remember being intrigued, being in question, consciously learning from that. Sifting through spirited “a-ha” moments and lots of murky doubt.

Now I’m the eldest person in the touring company… Still sifting through spirited “a-ha” moments and some murky doubt! I’m appreciating how much I’m pushed by those twenty-two and twenty-three year old members of the company, and the knowing that comes with being on another tier of life experience. Finding newness within the same practice, accepting its struggles, expecting the change. It wasn’t too long after I first came into the company Jawole had her 50th birthday, and I remember her being in rehearsal, saying, “This is the first time I’ve been able to do this stretch in my life!” I remember the impression that had on me of what it meant to be a life-long learner. It’s really remarkable to be inside a body of learning that has width enough for that kind of growth.

I taught at New York State Summer School of the Arts (NYSSSA) this summer and heard a remarkable lecture. The artist who talked about how the company he danced with for many years gave his body agency and expanded what he could do physically beyond what he thought possible. Sometimes this artist wanted to do his own thing, but he was in a specific methodology that didn’t allow for such exploration. When he decided to make dances and flex his own voice, the things he started going back to were the stories of his activist parents, remembering his feelings while listening to Nina Simone, how he would make faces in the mirror. He started digging up all these treasures, and that was the seed for how he was creating dance. What’s so beautiful is that this searching for treasures is the charge Jawole gives inside of the work. That’s the art maker’s practice. To pull from what you know was the very thing I explored with the students in our UBW technique and repertory workshops. When this artist spoke of the company he had been with, I thought of how opposite the drive of UBW is from that. You actually have to bring your full self to the work. This is how we create. It’s so brilliant and so human at the same time. Why would it make sense for you to only be a fraction of yourself and not the fleshiest, most textured version of yourself? I was reminded that this is not a given.

TAW: Do you feel like you’re actively transmitting those Core Values to the younger UBW members? Or that you’re retracing or reiterating those values in your practice as a performer, a mover in rehearsal, a teacher? Are you feeding those Core Values back into the UBW ecology?

CJ: Absolutely. In some regards, it’s the responsibility of the Associate Artistic Director: to share, probe, and push the dancer’s growth inside the methodology. The work has made me a more responsive artist and so the sharing comes by way of my doing. I recently watched Walking with Pearl...Africa Diaries of 2004. I remember how frightening and vulnerable it was to make decisions inside the work. I remember the songs I had to listen to over and over again to get my mind right so I could be bold and naked in the space, so I could actually live in my own choices. That’s much less of a challenge now. You give a task, an instruction and I’m already filtering it for what it means to me, in a way that puts me in my expertise, that challenges me: Where is the risk for me? How can I push myself inside of that? How can I find what puts me really inside of my groove? I’m thinking all that as I’m getting the instruction. How can I maximize me in that moment, in ways that allow me to bring truth but allow me to push myself so the growth factor still happens?

It took me sitting in this practice for a long time to reach the place where there’s a comfort in that discomfort. There’s comfort in knowing I can and have to make a choice. I watch the younger company members struggle in that space. The mom in me wants to give them information and tell them this is just the process. Sometimes I do that and still watch it run the course it has to take, because it’s a practice. It takes struggling through it, growing inside of it. And then you accumulate and grow all over again. There’s no shortcut, there’s no book you can read. It’s an embodied thing that takes time. Fortunately UBW is a playing field with which to bring that forward. We were just inside that very space in rehearsal.

TAW: And what happened?

CJ: We came back to what it means to make a decision. Samantha Speis (Associate Artistic Director) and I will give them a task to encourage the dancers to stay in the “frying pan” of that decision-making place. And everyone will do it because they’re phenomenal artists. Getting to the point where that becomes a go-to in how you navigate creativity or life? That’s experiential.

TAW: And you’ve reached a point where it’s in your cells. I don’t want to say “automatic,” because that makes it sound unthoughtful. But it’s already embodied from the start. So just by living that way in rehearsal you’re reiterating the Core Values to younger members. How do those values manifest in the choreographic practice?

CJ: “Validating the Individual”—that’s a big one. Walking With ‘Trane Side A & B is scored through states of being. The first state asks that you bring your mother tongue to the table: the movement, physical language, and experiences that live in your body as reservoirs of information that didn’t come from a classroom practice. In rehearsal Jawole will say, “Take a given movement phrase and put this in it...” I think my task was transcribing a drum solo as a petit allegro—in my brain that becomes this play of hip hop, house, combined with the percussive sensibility of tap. I made it my own by thinking about the things in my embodied movement practices that speak of the feet moving rapidly with dynamics and airspace; gliding, shooting, or soaring. I pull from what my body knows of that concept. I might play with it for five minutes, and then a count of eight gets put into the final work. But the rest of all that play is not for naught. It’s how my body deepens its understanding of what it can do with my roots of house dance, and hip hop from the 80s, 90s, early 2000s.

Creating art based on collective learning & research is part of UBW’s process. In our Chicago residency for Walking with ‘Trane we visited the Natural History Museum, the David Bowie Is exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art, “100 Saxophones for Sun Ra” on his 100th birthday, jazz lounges, story shares, and more. We were really interested in the history of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) so we sat with artists that are part of that lineage.

In our library study, Jawole gave us the task to go into the library and explore what called us. Dancer Courtney J. Cooke was drawn Coltrane’s upbringing in the church, noting it as a pillar in her own art making. She honed her focus in on the ring shout, the trance like state, duration, repetition, and the difference between the spirit being on you as opposed to in you. She created a physical and vocal exploration that encompassed her memories and research. It yielded a fresh palette for her explore with.

The research, critical study, and staying in the “frying pan” is part of the work of “Validating the Individual,” by way of pushing your understanding of who the individual is. Dr. Pearl Primus said, “dance has been my teacher.” Validating the individual doesn’t just mean I bring myself to the table and everything I bring is whole and great. You have to push and examine. Chanon in 2001 is not the same as Chanon in 2004, and couldn’t have imagined Chanon in 2016. The work has pushed me, has grown me.

TAW: In “Convenings and Gatherings” Marguerite discussed Jawole’s dedication to seeking out and nurturing black female choreographic voices. This Choreographic Center will formalize that mission—how has the trajectory you’ve experienced led to this moment in UBW?

CJ: UBW has always been a choreographic center. Now the focus, intention, and vision are to create a container to push what’s been happening all along. The company has always been a collective of artists with a point of view. It’s part of the audition. The audition is physical; it’s you doing this series of tasks; it’s what book are you reading. Ever since the first company, where those artists were all connected to their own choreographic voices and chose to come together as a collective.

I can remember a strong shift in thinking about our legacy around our 20th anniversary. More than likely that shift had been happening under the water, way before I caught wind of it, but anything like that must have started as a seed and a thought and a plan and a grant in order to make it happen. Jawole recognized the lack of black female choreographers represented in the concert dance landscape and the preservation of black female choreographers’ legacies. My first encounter with her efforts was by way of commissioning choreographer Millicent Johnnie to choreograph a segment of the HairStories (2001). In 2003, Kim Bears-Bailey was called upon to re-stage Dr. Pearl Primus’s original works on UBW, Hard Time Blues and Strange Fruit (1943). That was really impactful: having the opportunity to put these master works in my own body. To experience history and research woven into physical language. In 2004 Project Next Generation (PNG) was launched: commissioning female choreographers to set new work on UBW. Recipients were Bridget L. Moore and Camille A. Brown (2006). In 2008 UBW commissioned the restaging of Blondell Cummings’s Chicken Soup.

These modules preserved and furthered the legacy of black female choreographers. The Choreographic Center’s concern is to extend this reach. How can we serve not just the new artist but also those with developing and established practices? How do we prepare an ecosystem of presenters, funders, supporters to increase the demand and knowledge pool to support black radical, experimental voices?

I’m appreciating how we are folding the intentions of the Choreographic Center into our existing practices. Through BOLD, we’re sharing UBW methodology, history, and repertory study in ways that allow students to embody the learning process. At SLI this year we gathered organizers, funders, and policy makers to learn alongside artists. The process stretched their lenses and seeped into their understanding of black radical traditions. These efforts really affect the demand for risk-taking art by narrowing the proximity between the art maker and supporters. It’s one thing to read about art on a grant application or New York Times review; it’s another thing make an informed decision from embodied gut learning.

TAW: How will the core values—and other aspects of UBW’s ecology—shape the Center and develop new choreographic voices?

CJ: We draw from our thirty-plus year practice. We share the same methodology that has encouraged generations of company members to push, probe, discover, and evolve. The blueprint has always developed or refined choreographic voices. It’s a rigorous and unapologetic space for exploration.  Experimenting without trying to create work, but to facilitate learning. Also key is the shared space in which to do this. Much of UBW’s process is birthed of collaboration: the early works where Jawole collaborated with Laurie Carlos and Steve Kent; Walking with ‘Trane with Talvin Wilks. More brilliant minds in a room means more learning.  

I’m really excited about how the Choreographic Center is shaping the company. In regards to legacy, I’m noting a zeal to tell our herstory. It’s great to have someone write about our practices. It’s another kind of sharing for me to sit here with you, for you to record it, as many places as this conversation has gone! To be able to tell the story from inside embodied experience is aligned with our value of celebrating the African diaspora.

This journey of creating the Center is hammering in the awareness that we have to do this now. We have to tell our own story. As we find and shape containers to hold these practices, we also need to name our practices. In the same ways we’ve earmarked our shared legacy with others, it’s valuable for us to do the same with the work inside UBW. I’m really excited about how it’s feeding the organization—it’s asking us to hone in on what we do without codifying it and stopping it from evolving. This is a mind shift in how I’ve experienced information shared in the modern dance world. In my training, I studied the continuum of ideas codified in specific techniques and exercises. The value set swung between what’s strongly codified or what’s the trend, the new style. But UBW’s passing on of values and practices: the methodology is absolutely tangible and expected to grow.

Tipping the Balance of Power in the Dance World and Beyond by Jawole Zollar

The following is a transcription from the keynote address by Jawole Zollar at the Black Women in Dance: Stepping Out of the Barriers conference and festival produced by Serendipity in Leicester, UK in May, 2016.  In the keynote, Jawole Zollar discusses the conditions facing women choreographers of color that led to the launch of the UBW Choreographic Center, as well as the initial Cohort structures and founding principles of the Center.  The keynote is included in a new publication published by Serendipity celebrating and exploring the impact that Black women have made on the international dance ecology and can be purchased here.  

I can’t tell you how excited and thrilled I am to be here, as this is such an honor and a return. We toured to Leicester very early in our touring life in 1987 in one of our first tours to Europe. It was such a significant marker for us as a company, so to come back again and be part of this great conference and festival is really fantastic. As a way to give you an introduction to where Urban Bush Women has been and where we are now, I would like to share a video we developed for our 30th anniversary. It’s been 31 years now, which looking round the room – many of you weren’t even close to be conceived at that point, so it’s quite a joy and a pleasure to share this with you.

(UBW 30th Anniversary video text) We started with movement, bodies, shapes, choreography. Then we became a movement, bringing to life untold and untold stories of the disenfranchised, from a woman-centered perspective as members of the African Diaspora community, tipping the balance of power in the dance world and beyond. Our movement made of movement; is fervent and big hearted. We are insistent and active. We are receptive and always learning. We are full of hope. We are Urban Bush Women.

My name is Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and I am the Founding Artistic Director and Chief Visioning Officer of Urban Bush Women. When I formed this company, it was with the philosophy of making work together; dancers, musicians, poets, visual artists. We told stories, beginning with a company of seven women.  We were performing all over New York City establishing our voices and right away we were embraced by the women’s community, the social arts community, the social justice community. We began touring. We performed ‘Anarchy’, ‘Wild Women’ and ‘Dinah’; dances about women who made their own way, on their own terms. Our dances had singing and story telling, and they were bodacious, but during a performance in Charleston, South Carolina, I looked out into the audience and I didn’t see any Black people. Well, I saw two. So Urban Bush Women decided to go out and find African American audiences and working class folk, and people of color, by visiting schools and churches and community centers. Someone told me this was “outreach” hmm… We wanted to go deeper. We made works about homelessness; ‘Shelter’, and it won awards. ‘Lipstick’ was about girls becoming women. It showed Urban Bush Women makes work about social justice and the buzz that followed both works led to more touring and more touring led to more outreach. But we still felt we had more to offer.  

In the early 1990s we were invited to plan and facilitate a long-term residency in New Orleans. We started calling our work community engagement to distance it from the concept of “outreach”.  Outreach was a term we began to define as a large institution reaching out but more likely “down” to what it considers a fringe population for the purposes of checking off boxes of how many where served instead of creating authentic relationships. We entered communities through town hall meetings, and talked to our hosts to let the themes emerge from the community. We didn’t present ourselves as experts from New York. We wanted to learn and grow with the communities we were there to serve. And we always kept dance as a powerful center to the community engagement work. We established our Summer Leadership Institute at Florida State University with a curriculum combining art, culture and social issues and aimed to train a new dancer for a new society. We were going deeper and then in 2000 we faced a financial crisis. It made us look long and hard at what we valued as a company. We fought to survive; we wrote and committed ourselves to core values that still guide us today. Urban Bush Women validates the individual, serves as a catalyst for progressive social change, build and nurtures trust through process, enters communities and co-creates stories, celebrates the African Diaspora, and recognises that place matters.

New works were created and our methodology grew even stronger. We began talking more confidently about our community engagement processes. Then in 2009 I hit a creative wall. With great courage and faith I put the company on a two and a half year hiatus. I wanted us to really look at what we needed to support our artistic work, our leadership work and our engagement work and the processes that center that work. We needed to put the art making instead of the market back in the center. During this time we focused on leadership development, our work through ‘BOLD’: Builders, Organizers and Leaders through Dance. We reflected on our mission to see where we had drifted. We examined everything. Then we came back strong after taking time to edify and look at that which makes us unique. We deepened our partnership with the People’s Institute to strengthen our work, to understand the structural analysis of racism and how it impacts the stories we need to tell.

Research, Do, Delve Deeper, Learn! This exemplifies the Urban Bush Women way. I am, you are, we are Urban Bush Women.

The video gives context and history to the work and now I’m going to go a little into how we articulate where we are now.

ORIGINS OF CURRENT THINKING

I looked back at the idea of post-modernism as a defining place for American modern dance in the 60’s and 70’s. There was a generative period of experimentation that was mostly defined through a White post-modern lens while ignoring the robust experimentation that was going on in Black and communities of color.

In looking at the Judson Church, Fluxus, Grand Union and other White postmodernist movements, I began to look at the underlying philosophical frameworks of how people were thinking and creating. At the same time I began examining Black radical experimentation, content, structure and form.  I wanted to look at what would be the underlying mechanism that supports Black radical experimentation, and it took me to the ‘Ring Shout’.  As a person interested in global movements, my primary lens is as an African American woman, raised in segregation who came of age during the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. My international travels have heightened my curiosity and study of what is uniquely American and in particular, African American.

I’m going to offer up a provocative statement.

I’m starting to think that White European derived forms focus on heightened abstraction, form and structure to diminish emotionality. Africanist derived forms focus on heightened emotionality to define form, structure and abstraction. I’m not saying one is better than the other, but I’m saying there are two different ways. However, one has been lifted up as the center of the universe.

European derived forms are not the center of the universe; they are part of the universe, but not the center.

Ballet and classical and contemporary European art forms are part of my training and they have great value.  But what if we look at them in the way my dear friend, choreographer Liz Lerman would, she talks about the horizontal in contrast to the vertical and she has a great book called “Hiking the Horizontal”. So if we see; Hip-Hop, Tap, Ballet, Contemporary Dance, Martha Graham technique and so on… the standards of how we judge what is good, what is excellent, does not hold ballet at the top, or at the center. And this is a place where, in the United States, there is still a lot of struggle and hierarchy in what gets lifted up as excellent, and what gets funding, and how the many forms of dance are spoken and written about, when ascribing their value.

It’s important for us to look at experimentation, and the legacy of experimentation, and creating work in Black radical forms, and I look at everything from music to writing to film, and that was such an important thing to me when coming to Leicester in ’87, and seeing the film coming out of the Black community here, and seeing it as a challenge to define and push my own work. As I look at the current landscape, the need for UBW to establish a choreographic center that lifts up Africanist approaches by female choreographers of color, particularly in experimental work, is pressing.

UBW’s Choreographic Center is how Urban Bush Women has chosen to go forward to influence our current dance landscape.  We launched our Center in January 2016 with two focuses; supporting and strengthening leadership and vision in individual choreographers, and then bringing about systemic change in the field of dance.

RUNNING TOWARDS THE FIRE WHILE YOU ARE ON FIRE

Another way I describe the aesthetic of the Choreographic Center is “running towards the fire while you’re on fire”. That was the urgency in the 60s and 70s that we felt, our communities were on fire, we were on fire and rather than say “no, we’re going to go into a different idea and form” and back away from the urgency of the political and social contexts affecting our lives.  No!  We were saying “we’re going to run right into that fire” because we were on fire with passion, anger, frustration, love, joy, and we’re going to acknowledge that and create from that. So feeling this urgency to speak truth to power. Bringing the multitude of our traditions to the center, and looking at the writings that came out, particularly in the 1970s and looking at language, and how language could reflect a whole cultural identity.  One example is on language and the value of the vernacular. There was a poet called Don L. Lee, who changed his name to Haki Madhubuti. He wrote a very influential poem at the time, and it took vernacular language and brought the poetry of that language to the surface. One of the lines from the poem is:

“Him so cool, super cool, him don’t even stop for red lights.”

Helping Black female choreographers to find their urgency, their passion and their voice by examining their entire familial, community and cultural history brings a valuing of the many physical and vocal languages that can inform their unique way to tell their story.

THE MARGINS AND THE CENTER – FINDING NEW MODELS BY UNDERSTANDING INTERNALIZED RACIAL OPPRESSION

Finding new models, for those of us who have lived involuntarily at the margins – we can find strength from the margins as a way to critique the crumbling center of White and European dominated culture and ideas, because the center is changing. It’s falling apart and it needs to fall apart. I’m not talking about being marginalized, I’m just saying standing back, we can see what’s going on in the center and we can create from that place and it’s a very powerful place.

We can find liberation by examining internalised racial oppression in our methodologies, teaching and art that we produce. So we work with an organisation called the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond, and it does workshops all over the world called understanding and undoing racism. And they hold two central ideas about internalised racial oppression; one is internalized racial superiority and internalized racial inferiority.

Internalized racial superiority is by people who’ve become to be called White. So it’s the assumptions that you learn, you carry, the unexamined assumptions that are a part of that background history, legacy and present day for people who become to be called White.

Internalized racial inferiority is the legacy that we carry as people who’ve come to be called Black, of how racism, affects us; the unexamined ways the messages of our inferiority are expressed in our art and our life, and how these unexamined manifestations of oppression can show up in our work even with the best of intentions, because when their unexamined we don’t even know it’s coming forward. This unconscious, unexamined place is what allows us to duplicate colonized methodologies of creating and teaching dance while de-emphasizing experimentation and risk.

TOWARD A LIBERATORY PRACTICE

In order to create an environment of risk, it means people must have permission to be curious and permission to fail. How many of us grew up with a ballet teacher with a stick? I began to notice that in poor communities and usually in poor communities of color the most rewarded behavior is obedience. You see it in the schools. You see it in the institutions. The value that is held up the most is obedience; obey this step.  I noticed that when I went to institutions of privilege, I saw the highest value and most rewarded behavior was around critical thinking, not obedience. Obedience is preparing poor people and Black people from the school to prison or military pipeline. But critical thinking is a value that you see in the educational systems populated by those who inhabit race and class privilege.  They are prepared to answer the question “how do you understand the world that you’re in and become prepared to comment on and take action in that world”?

If we’re going to step up an environment of risk, we have to embrace critical thinking, curiosity and thinking way outside the lines.  I came up in old school teaching methodologies in dance and I have really had to work hard to undo militarism.  The old school training process, which meant only the strongest will survive, and the teacher’s stance was “I’m going to let you know if you’re one of the weak ones you’re going to know real quick, because I’m going to put you down. I’m going to talk about you with your mom and your momma’s momma, to make sure that you’re strong enough and tough enough.”  I understand this approach and it can be very effective in making an obedient accomplished dancer.  There is another way to achieve excellence and grit.  You need grit. We need to be tough to move out into the world but not at the expense of our humanity.  We can accomplish both. We also need environments where you can think, where you can fail, where you can investigate, where you can inquire, so if our focus is only on obedience then a risk environment doesn’t have a chance to succeed.

When you jump on a dancer with a correction and you have the force of your authority, you’ve just cut off risk.  If you say “that’s wrong” and keep repeating that and after a while you get obedience; you might get excellent obedience, but you’re not getting the creative, generative dancer that we at Urban Bush Women value and look for. Women and Black women become more victimized by this colonized methodology. Because there are fewer male dancers than women in our field, the male dancer gets a lot of affirmation on the importance of their presence and creative voice.  Women are told directly or indirectly you are a dime a dozen.  This cuts off the idea that we have an important creative voice.

TEACHING METHODOLOGIES – DECONOLONIZING OUR METHODOLOGIES

Let’s focus on how UBW is looking at decolonizing our methodologies as dancers and choreographers as a part of the work of the Choreographic Center. When we started this Choreographic Center the idea was to bring about a different awareness, understanding and examination of our practice as a way to create liberation methodologies. This idea of decolonizing our methodologies and how we train in dance is essential. Dance traditionally has been hierarchical, that there’s an all knowing teacher, that by hook or by crook gets you to submit to the authority of that teacher, and participant or student then regurgitates back through the form the teacher has given what they have learned.

There’s another way. There’s another possibility. We hold that the generative dancer, holistic dance training and choreographic practice follow UBW’s process of art making which involves iterative cycles of rigorous embodied research informed by a vast field of movement practices and by radical Black experimentation in the fields of culture, politics and history. The UBW performers develop a self-directed solo practice that allows them to devise original works through a collaborative process.

The dancer becomes responsible for that research and in doing so helps the dance gain a sense of their own power. It is not enough to know a step, to be able to execute steps. There is a complex training methodology that supports that our work that includes ballet, modernist and post-modern forms, contemporary, vernacular and social dance as well as theater based practices. There is a heavy somatics focus that is a part of our work and training, and it includes the Ring Shout --, ways of knowing that are ancestral, that are connected to our elders in our community, and at its core is pelvic awareness.

When I teach at the university, I teach at Florida State University, most of the dancers are come into the program are primarily ballet trained or coming from a background in dance competition. So pelvic awareness is a big thing, because they have been taught to stabilize their pelvis and hold onto that stabilization for dear life. We’re saying that even within certain modern practices, that’s a holding, tensing pattern that does not allow you to be responsive. A question that guides our research is “how can we create core strength and core stability without that holding, tensing pattern within the pelvis”? How do we honor our Africanist traditions of movement practice that release and see the fluidity in the whole spine? Both things can be true, it’s not an either or. It’s a di-unital concept, both and, both things can be true – core stability and pelvic fluidity. We’re looking at connectivity, not only physically, spatially, but also historically, politically. When we’re working for connection, initiation and sequencing, all of that connects to history, political awareness. We’re saying these are connected, and we bring this into the room by our assumptions whether we’ve examined them or not.

We look at strength and strength is very important to us. As a person who grew up with a certain desire to understand and be a part of what people called the “release” movement, I found that the many ways I wanted to express strength, I wanted to express power and I wanted to express “grit” and resilience with Africanist movement practices at the core were not reflected in what people at that time were calling “release”. But I needed to express strength, power and grit because that is part of our cultural lineage. I want risk, inquiry, investigation and experimentation inside of a training methodology that would help me gain a full sense of my power and my full humanity. 

UBW’S CHOREOGRAPHIC CENTER

Our Choreographic Center and our work with choreographers support the development of leadership and the strengthening and supporting the vision of Black female choreographers and women of color choreographers.

I like to use nature as a way to bring clarity to conceptual ideas.  We have a structure of three cohorts of choreographic development each with a different need.

THE SWAMP AND THE DESERT – COHORT ONE – FINDING AND ARTICULATING VOICE

What I see in the U. S. is a pattern of disempowerment around subject matter and choreographic choices.  When a young, Black, choreographer is starting, their usually starting from the swamp, the gut, the feeling. It’s often in response to something that has happened.  In Florida and across the U.S. we saw lots of pieces responding to the murder of a young man, Trayvon Martin. We saw lots of work like that responded to with rage – from the gut. Often the works are emotional, unsophisticated and didactic. I see this as a beginning step in their choreographic journey.  In the universities I see they are often cut off at the limb with an unwillingness to see the validity of the choreographer’s ideas. I hear “that’s bad work”. As opposed to saying that is the beginning, this is a beginning place working from the swamp, and this is an important place. If we can value that as an important place then we can learn how to put the tools in place to help them make this work better. What I often see in the very budding voice is a lack of support for the choreographer. The choreographer gets very confused, disempowered and starts to then take on “if I want to be a good choreographer I need to leave that behind my culture, my passions and take on other kinds of assumptions”. I see working from the swamp as a first and important step.

At some point we have to go to the desert, that means you have to strip away, you have to take away all of the essentials. You have to be in this kind of barren, vulnerable place that’s very scary. But it’s really not barren, because there’s lots of life in the desert, you don’t necessarily see it at first. This process with the swamp and the desert is what we are identifying as our Cohort One – the emerging choreographer. We are examining how we support emerging choreographers, looking at their work from the swamp, and then being in a process of the desert, helping them strip away assumptions. It’s not an audience centric process, and this is where I find that audiences that have been programmed to only see the values of “steps”, have very little patience for this stage of investigation, because it’s experimental and it doesn’t quite know where it’s going.  We can educate audiences to be curious and excited and watching work in this developmental stage.  Yet, I see experimental White choreographer critiqued in a very different way in the US, when I see White experimental choreographers who are in the desert, who are stripping away, but who are less concern with social political issues and more concern with form, structure and abstraction.  This in itself is not the problem.  What is the problem is the valuing of one type of beginning experimentation over the other.

In both of these cases it’s not audience centric, but the audience is important as a witness. The audience is not at the center of what the choreographer needs to learn. So when Urban Bush Women first started, my training was Cunningham, Graham, Limon, and that was their voices.  I wanted to find my voice, to strip down. I went to the UBW dancers, and declared you cannot point your feet, I don’t want you to “pull up”, I want us to go to a primal, emotional place. Strip away everything that we’ve thought about in order to find a unique voice. It’s a very important period, and it must be supported. The choreographer has to be encouraged to wildly experiment and strip away fear based on assumptions of what “good choreography” is supposed to look like.

THE MOUNTAINS – COHORT TWO – ARTICULATING AND DEEPENING CRAFT, RIGOR & VISION

Then what we have is our second cohort. People who are learning to scale the mountains. You need engineering and tools. You need craft. You can’t just go up the mountain and hope for the best, you’ve got to figure out the ways in which you’re going to get up and down that mountain. This is where your craft and your rigor, and your attention to detail come in. You’ve got to have a strong rope and you’ve got to have tested your systems. You need support to achieve your highest vision. In regard to our middle cohort of choreographers, this is where we want to assist. This is where dramaturgy comes in really strong; why are you doing, what are you doing? Really being granular looking at the processes of the work. If we do this with the first cohort, it’s almost too soon; it’s almost shutting it off. We want to turn on the valve for that Cohort One. For Cohort Two we want to support how the vision climbs to the highest peaks. How can you create your most excellent work, and how can we support that? And we’re putting together teams of dramaturgs, historians, directors, choreographer who can mentor this process.

THE OCEAN AND THE ISLAND – COHORT THREE – SUSTAINING THE VISION

Now for Cohort Three, you are doing your work but you are in the middle of the ocean. You have vast possibilities.  You are getting support, commissions and residencies but you need a lifeboat because you don’t have infrastructure. You don’t have the things that support this amazing vision. In our performance you will see the work of Nora Chipaumire vision with dark swan, So how can we at the Choreographic Center support that period of being in the ocean, where the possibilities are vast and unlimited but you can swim out there by yourself forever.

THE FOREST

Then somewhere when you’re in that third cohort you get lost in the forest. So you start to achieve success, build infrastructure and an organization to support your vision and everyone’s telling you that you’re doing good work but you’ve lost your path because you start to think “maybe success means this” or “maybe success means that” or “I should keep doing that. That was successful, maybe I should repeat that.” so you start to get lost in the forest and begin to second guess your path or maybe you can’t find your path anymore.

THE ISLAND

Then you go to an island. Spend some time of the island, reflect, come back into self.

Then actually you start this process all over again. These are the three cohorts, but anyone of them can get lost in the forest at any time, any one of them might need to go to the desert to strip away. Any one of them might need tools to scale a mountain. So this is what our hope is to do in terms to support choreographers. So when people ask us what the structure around the Choreographic Center is where it’s housed. It’s not housed in a building. In fact we actually don’t want a building, unless it comes with millions and millions of money for capital to operate the building, because we’re seen too many organizations go under from having a building they can’t maintain. When we get to that point when we can have that, yes we want a building, we want a space, but part of that we want to focus on now is partnerships with organizations that have spaces; University centers, community centers that can provide residencies, that can provide support for the work that we want to do.

The Choreographic Center is an amoeba like structure.  It is responsive. We’re not saying the Choreographic Center is rigid. We’re flexible and responsive. As creative people we’re always changing. We need to change. This is our greatest challenge with funders.  They want to define, hard and fast, ways in which we’re working. And what we’ve learned also from our Summer Leadership Institute, which I’ll also talk about, is that from our community practice it is the same. Funders would say “what are you going to go out and do in the community, outline it and tell us your outcomes”. If we tell you that we haven’t done our process, our process is to go and talk with a community, seek a mutual agreement, look at mutual risk, look at mutual investment and then we can talk about what might happen. But if we write down what will happen in advance, we’ve not been in process, we’ve been in the funders’ process, not our process. So the same way with the Choreographic Center, How do we explain this? We want the funders to understand that this process is important because it is the process we use in creating work. How many people have written a description for a grant for funding for a piece that you haven’t even been in the studio to discover what’s real yet? You’re trying to write a good fiction, but the truth is you really don’t know because you haven’t been there yet, but you try and make up the best fiction that you can in order to secure the funds. What if funders really understood that?

UBW’S SUMMER LEADERSHIP INSTITUTE (SLI) AS THE RESEARCH BODY FOR THE CHOREOGRAPHIC CENTER

Going back into our SLI, which is now in its 16th year.  The SLI looks at activism and art making, again in a holistic way. Now doing it 16 times, not 16 times in a row, but 16 times, we started being a four-week SLI, but we realized we only got young people, because they take off four weeks in the summer. Moving it to be a 10-day allowed a more diverse group of participants.

So this is what we’ve learned from Urban Bush Women’s SLI, and what we hope to embody in our Choreographic Center. Lizzy Cooper Davis, has summed up UBW’s work and belief system with the following statements:

1. WE BELIEVE COMMUNITY IS STRENGTHENED BY EACH INDIVIDUAL’S FULL PRESENCE AND HOLISTIC ENGAGEMENT.

We want to bring all of our histories forward; personal biography, presence of mind, body and spirit. We’re not saying one history is more important than the other, but how do we create an environment where everybody feels they can bring their history forward?

2. WE BELIEVE THAT ART ARTICULATES COMMUNITIES, AESTHETICS AND ETHICS.

When I talk about the Ring Shout, you see the Ring Shout from Beyoncé to our dearly beloved Prince, you see those forms within Black American traditions. You see it in Arthur Mitchells work, you see and hear it all over the world.

3. WE EMBRACE MULTIPLE ROLES: TEACHER, STUDENT, ORGANIZER, LEADER, MENTOR, MENTEE, ELDER, ETC.

There is not a hierarchy of what that is; it’s a role at a particular point in time. If I only say I am a mentor, I am an elder; I lose an opportunity to learn and to grow. These roles can happen all at the same time, you might be all of them at once.

4. WE VALUE EMBODIED LEARNING AND MOVEMENT AS METAPHORS FROM MOVEMENT BUILDING.

When we’re learning about racism in our SLI we also look at it’s physicality; how it’s impacting us and where is this information hitting us? And we look at how we can then embody our internal states to learn more about who we are and how we are processing information.

5. WE STRESS THE IMPORTANCE OF AFFIRMATION, HONORING AND CELEBRATION.

When I was growing up in Kansas City, we use to have a party for everything. So your dog got house trained, you have a party, because it’s important to celebrate. It’s a tradition. We do hard work so we have to affirm and celebrate what we’ve accomplished. Sometime they’re big accomplishments, and sometimes their small, but that tradition of honoring and celebrating is an important part of communities from the African Diaspora. I grew up in segregation in Kansas City, Missouri, so I didn’t encounter White people socially until I was in college. When I was invited to a party by a group of White friends I kept sitting there thinking when is the dancing going to start? A couple of hours now, lots of drinking but when are we going to start dancing? Because in the tradition I grew up in, a party was a celebration of dance. Somebody said you were invited to a party it meant a celebration of dancing, not a celebration of drinking and talking. So these cultural distances, of affirmation through dancing, this is what we’re saying is important to us as a cultural value.

6. WE RECOGNIZE THAT WISDOM RESIDES IN THE GROUP AND MODEL LEADERSHIP THROUGH FACILITATED DIALOGUE AND COLLABORATION RATHER THAN INSTRUCTION.

The dialogue and collaboration with the dancers and their research that they are bringing to the table is very important to how work is created, how we’re learning. If I am in a dialogue with myself, then it gets convoluted in my head. I’ve got to know from other people, and I don’t ever believe that I’m the smartest person in the room. I think that’s a real trap.

7. WE VALUE THE PROCESS OF CONTINUED RISK, FALL AND RECOVERY OVER ASSERTIONS OF STABILITY, BELIEVE THE WOBBLING IS THE BALANCING AND THAT BEING PUSHED OFF BALANCE WILL ENHANCE RAHTER THAN INHIBIT THE GROUP’S ABILITY TO PERFORM AND SUCCEED. 

I grew up with that concept, “be on your leg” and that holding, gripping, pattern to get on the leg does not create stability. The oscillation and the movement that you have to find, that you have to be aware of in order to find stability is really important, and sometimes it’s big, and sometimes it’s really tiny. So that the wobbling and being pushed off balance, deliberate destabilization, within the learning process, a place where you are destabilized in order to learn. It doesn’t mean someone holding a stick over you and beating you into submission, but it means by unearthing assumptions of what you hold to be real. If this is what I have known, in order to find a new place, I’m going to have to let going of something. That is going to be destabilizing. It’s going to change something, shake up something and destabilize my whole emotional self, and if I’m not willing to go through that whole destabilization I will only do what I know, I will default back to what is comfortable. We talk about this in the company all the time, be aware of your defaults, because they lead you back to what’s comfortable. We’ve got to be willing to risk, be off balance, and to understand that that is what’s going to take us to a new place, that is what is going to help us succeed and find new information. What’s true one year is not true the next year and I can definitely tell you that from the aging process. What’s true one year, one month is not true the next. It’s a constant realigning of oneself and one’s environment.  

THE RING SHOUT – THE BIRTH OF BLACK AMERICAN ART MAKING TRADITIONS

The Ring Shout is a particular Black American form.  When I look at how experimentation and dance in the Black community is shaped, the Ring Shout is the foundation for the practice.  The following statements are articulated by Lizzy Cooper Davis in her documentation of UBW’s Summer Leadership Institute work.

·      The Ring Shout is a practice that originated in the Caribbean and US south, and was an embodied practice of worship of the enslaved.

·      Participants moved in a counter-clockwise circle while singing songs of worship or prayer to the rhythms of their shuffling feet and clapping hands. The ring facilitated the range of deep expression and release essential for the health and maintenance of the community

·      Sterling Stuckey (1988) explains, the Ring Shout was “a central organizing principle of slave culture”

In the United States, what was really interesting about how slavery was practiced is that the enslaved were separated from each other – ethnic groups were deliberately divided -- there was a conscious movement to make sure that ethnic groups were not together and could not speak the same languages. As the practice of Christianity was imposed or brought to the enslaved, the slave owners were disturbed by the movements with which the African American people brought to their worship. We didn’t just sit still and sing, as was the Anglican practise. The African enslaved were moving and embodying their worship traditions. This started to become embodied into the Ring Shout. The rhythms of the Ring Shout are achieved through clapping hands and the use of a broomstick in replacement for the drum. This was due to the fact that drums were outlawed very early on during the period of slavery – beginning approximately in 1740 and continuing forward.  The shuffling feet, the hands, the clapping, the broom or stick that’s pounded on the floor; those became another way of the drum being expressed. The ring shout is the way we released and expressed our feelings and ways of creating community survival and resilience. Davis further elaborates:

“During a time when their dancing was forbidden and considered blasphemous in religious settings, the Ring Shout’s subtle footwork fell strategically outside European definitions of dance and thus smuggled the movement so integral to African cosmologies into black American prayer. Within the safety of the ring, expression ranged from supplication to joy and from flailing grief to trance-like prayer but the circle, its motion and its song, remained constant.”

Hearing about the shout and experiencing it are two different things so I thought would be interesting show you a bit of the Ring Shout with the company, the transcription of which follows.

There are a lot of different Ring Shout songs. In the shout there’s a caller, clappers or broom person and singers. It’s a call and response form.

Tendayi sings: I say “run Mary run!” and you say “oh Lord!”

Tendayi: “Run Martha Run!”

Group responds: “Oh Lord!”

Tendayi: “Run Mary Run!”

Group: “Oh Lord!”

Tendayi: “You got the right to the tree of life! You got a right, you got a right!”

Group: “You got the right to the tree of life!”

Tendayi: “You got a right, you got a right!”

Group: “You got the right to the tree of life!”

And there’s the clapping and you can join us in the clapping, and you can create sounds with the clapping. So if you go to the base clap you want to cup [your hands]. Higher pitched clapping [with your fingers] and mid-level [flat hands]. You can choose where you want to come in – if you want to be in the bass, the soprano. And when I ask them to move, they’re young, they’re dancers – so I ask them to think how their grandmothers would have moved, otherwise we can go into a more contemporary idea. There are people in the US who are beautifully taking the legacy of the Ring Shout into contemporary forms. I want to give you more of a sense of its legacy.  The idea is really to embody that’s place of grandmothers, grandfathers, great-grandmother, great-grandfathers – our ancestors.

Many of you may recognize aspects of the shout in the masterful work of Mr Ailey, ‘Revelations’. You may also see the actions of the shout embodied through caricature and humor. I think of it as a sacred dance. It is sacred dance; it carries sacred histories and contains sacred practices. In contemporary practice you’ll see the legs crossed, you’ll see, we talk about shouting churches or Holy Ghost churches, or Pentecostal churches, and you may have seen people in the various aspects of the shout.  We recognize that it is a somatic process, practice and belief. It is about connecting an internal state to an external state and it is rooted in all aspects of African American culture.

IF we think of the Ring Shout as foundational to the Black experience in worship, prayer, music and movement, we can begin to see how many historical and contemporary forms have their roots in the Ring Shout and the importance of this legacy to what differentiates the art-making, storytelling and physical impulses from the origins of the White post-modern experimentation and art-making.  Black being-ness is rooted in this tradition and continues to shape what we hold important to bringing our art to the world.

WE CREATE THE CONTAINER AND BELIEVE THE CIRCLE WILL HOLD US, HONORING THE ETHICS OF COMMUNITY INHERENT IN THE RING SHOUT. 

Within the value of the Ring shout, if we create an environment where we can Be, where we know we are supported by a community. It doesn’t mean everything’s lovely, it means that we’re challenged, that there’s rigor. Then we are honoring the ethics of the Ring Shout, which honors the struggles we go through at the same time as moving forward toward resolution.

In the spirit of learning, generosity, love and gratitude, I’m so happy that we are here in Leicester; that we can share something about Urban Bush Women’s journey, how we’re thinking right now, and where we hope to go. Your questions and comments will help inspire all of us to think more deeply and more powerful about what’s possible.

REFERENCES

UBW 30th Anniversary Video. https://vimeo.com/149164982

Stuckley, Sterling (1998) Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America Oxford University Press

Questions of Practice: Jawole Willa Jo Zollar on Artistic Evolution and Risk

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, choreographer and founding artistic director of Urban Bush Women, discusses her evolution as a choreographer and the importance of embracing risk throughout her practice. “Risk exists on the edge of failure…so if you’re not right on that edge of failure…you’re not in a place of risk. Living on that edge and learning from that edge to me is a really exciting place,” she says.

Questions of Practice is produced by the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage and serves as a hub for the exchange of ideas and ongoing dialogue on issues critical to cultural practice.

THE SUMMER LEADERSHIP INSTITUTE: Strengthening Core Muscles for Organizing, Art-Making and Community Building By Lizzy Cooper Davis

Applications are now open for UBW’s annual Summer Leadership Institute (SLI) (Apply Here), a 10-day intensive in the company’s choreographic and community practices and a foundational component of the Choreographic Center. The SLI expands and strengthens the network of what Jawole Willa Jo Zollar calls “front line social justice workers” by bringing dance professionals, community-based artists and organizers together for a learning experience in anti-racist dialogue, community engagement and art-making. Inspired by inherited models of black feminist art and organizing as well as leadership- and movement-building centers such as The Highlander Folk School, the SLI offers an immersive, residential experience where, by learning and living together, we imagine community solutions and put our principles into practice. 

Each year the SLI focuses on a social justice theme. In addition to daily dance classes and the creation of a culminating performance, engagement with this theme is facilitated by: an Intentional Dialogue Process learned from Tammy Bormann and David Campt and adapted for the SLI; a two-day workshop in “Understanding and Undoing Racism” offered by partner organization, The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISAB); UBW’s workshop on “Entering, Building, and Exiting Community;” and UBW’s practice of Soul Deep Listening where developing an ongoing practice of healing oneself and one’s own community precedes action in or engagement with other communities. 

Members of the Choreographic Center will participate in the SLI in a variety of capacities and will be supported in using the experience to deepen their own creative inquiry. Just as conditioning is continual for a dancer, we believe strengthening anti-racist practices of dialogue, community engagement and art-making is an ongoing process. Choreographic Center cohort-members will, therefore, also have the opportunity to attend workshops throughout the year to build on learning begun at the SLI. 

INHERITED MODELS

The SLI invests in black feminist traditions of art and organizing. As such, and in keeping with UBW’s core value of honoring the culture and history of the African Diaspora, the SLI takes up the community ethic embodied in the Ring Shout and the leadership model exemplified by Ella Jo Baker.

The Ring Shout: Originating in the Caribbean and US South, the Ring Shout was an embodied worship practice of the enslaved. Participants moved in a counter-clockwise circle while singing songs of worship or prayer to the rhythms of their shuffling feet and slapping hands. During a time when their dancing was forbidden and considered blasphemous in religious settings, the Ring Shout’s subtle footwork fell strategically outside European definitions of dance and thus smuggled the movement so integral to African cosmologies into black American prayer. Within the safety of the ring, expression ranged from supplication to joy and from flailing grief to trance-like prayer but the circle, its motion and its song, remained constant. The ring facilitated the range of deep expression and release essential for the health and maintenance of the community. The community circle forged at the SLI endeavors to enact the principles of the ring for, as historian Sterling Stuckey explains, the Ring Shout was “a central organizing principle of slave culture.” (Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America, Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 1988, p. xii.)

From the Ring Shout we inherit:

• a belief in the transformative power of dance in forging community, supporting healing, and facilitating growth; 
• a valuing of the embodied wisdom of African-descendant practices;
• an understanding that a community committed to growth will challenge its members to take great risks; 
• a recognition that safe space is not always comfortable space; 
• a commitment to building a circle that will catch and support all of its members; 
• an acceptance of joy and strength as well as anger and struggle; 
• a vigilance in maintaining the circle.

Ella Jo Baker: Ella Jo Baker (1903-1986) was a life-long organizer for racial and economic justice. Although frequently eclipsed by the civil rights era’s charismatic, celebrity leaders, Baker’s behind-the-scenes organizing was no less foundational or significant. She held leadership positions in both the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and she founded In Friendship to fight Jim Crow laws and ran the Crusade for Citizenship to facilitate voter registration. In 1960, her desire to support the student activists of Greensboro, North Carolina, led her to call a national meeting of young organizers. This move was characteristic of Baker’s organizing style in that, rather than dictate what should be done, it facilitated a gathering for young activists to strategize for themselves. This historic 1960 meeting birthed the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) which was arguably the civil rights movement’s most radical and successful effort to address segregation and voting rights. (For more on Ella Baker see Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005 and Joanne Grant’s film “Fundi: The Story of Ella Baker,” Icarus Films, 1981.)

From Ella Jo Baker we inherit: 

• a commitment to group-centered leadership that is facilitative rather than didactic;
• a belief that those most affected by a problem should lead the strategizing and action around its solutions; 
• an investment in hearing, following, and supporting young people; 
• a practice of cultivating our capacities for both leadership and followship;
• an attention to multiple forms of leadership and valuing of leadership enacted behind-the-scenes, not just in-the-spotlight.

STRUCTURE

The SLI is structured by local partnerships, curricular modules, and collaborative community events. These components facilitate learning about UBW’s choreographic tools and pedagogic principles while animating the company’s core values.

SLI Core Components: Local Partnerships with The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISAB), The Institute of Women and Ethnic Studies (IWES), Junebug Productions, Ashé Cultural Center, and Tulane University have ensured UBW’s accountable and collaborative work in New Orleans, the city that has hosted the SLI for the past seven years. With the Institute’s return to Brooklyn this year, UBW is committed to developing local partnerships in New York while also maintaining its collaboration with PISAB. Curricular Modules include: the division of the SLI community into Task Groups with assigned areas of leadership and responsibility; Daily Dance Classes for all levels emphasizing physical rigor and mining the metaphorical richness of “movement for movement building;” the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond’s Undoing Racism Workshop; UBW’s Entering, Building and Exiting Community (EBX) workshop; guided processes of Movement Synthesis to facilitate embodied reflection after each workshop; an Asset Mapping process that is central to UBW’s community engagement process and used at the SLI to build performance material from the talents in the room; an art-making process of Collaborative Creation; and a free Culminating Performance open to community members of all ages. Community Events bring the broader community into the conversations of the SLI, are free and open to the public and include a UBW-led, inter-generational dance class on black social dances called “How We Got to the Funk.” 

Choreographic Tools and Pedagogical Practices: The SLI’s collaborative creation process utilizes UBW’s hallmark Choreographic Tools: 

• Theme Selection and Research, where all performers conduct research into a pre-selected theme and significant rehearsal time is dedicated to sharing and discussing our findings;
• Embodied Synthesis, where research material and responses are physically processed and shared; 
• Asset Mapping, where the group’s performance and production strengths are identified; 
• Affinity Group Formation, where people with shared skills and interests come together; 
• Self-Directed Material Generation, where affinity groups work independently to create material; 
• Learning Set Choreography, where UBW-created material is learned by the group; 
• Story Boarding Process, where the director’s process of synthesizing material and visioning the final performance structure is shared.

Daily dance classes and workshops model UBW’s hallmark Pedagogical Practices:

• Believing in the value and power of Dance for Everybody, we cultivate the skills needed to teach classes for all levels, backgrounds, and bodies;
• Believing the studio to be a space for strengthening our muscles for both physical and community movement, our classes are designed to be Practice for Group Process;
• Believing in the liberating potential of physical communication in our debate-based society, we encourage Non-Verbal Dialogue;
• Believing that no space is neutral and no perspective is objective, we invite dancers to Leave Nothing at the Door and bring their full selves into the studio;
• Believing that specialized language can be alienating and exclusive, whenever possible we use Inclusive Language drawn from familial or cultural rather than institutional centers of knowledge;
• Believing there is an oppressive over-emphasis on conformity, we value Individuality through improvisation and within choreography.
• Believing in the importance of Cultural Equity, we commit to studying and sharing the histories of the forms we teach and inviting the cultural wisdom of those in the room;
• Believing there is often an unhealthy focus on body-type in the dance world, we strive to create an inclusive studio space that values a joyful and rigorous commitment to Health and Wellness. 

Value-based Learning: The structure, pedagogy and teachings of the Institute are grounded in UBW’s core values [add link], guiding principles and intentional practices. UBW has also adopted The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond’s Commitments for Anti-Racist Organizing:

• Undo Racism
• Understand, Share and Celebrate Culture
• Learn from History
• Analyze Manifestations of Racism
• Network
• Undo Internalized Racial Oppression
• Develop Leadership
• Maintain Accountability
• And Reshape Gatekeeping

SLI 2016: JULY 22nd-31st IN BROOKLYN, NY

This summer, the Institute returns to Brooklyn, NY, and will take up the theme “You, Me, We—Understanding Internalized Racial Oppression and How it Manifests in Our Artistic Community.” Participants, company and staff will examine manifestations of internalized racism in both white people and people of color and explore its influence in community organizing and art-making. The company has articulated the following guiding questions: 

• Do we find ourselves striving for pre-defined ideas of beauty and excellence?
• Does our work challenge or recreate dominant frameworks and systems of policing that ignore history, culture, power and lineage?
• How can we explode predetermined expectations, restore our full humanity and activate our true strength? 

For more information and to apply please CLICK HERE