\n<\/p>\n
Sometime in the early 1980s, the choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zollar had a life-changing dream. Her dead parents, Dot and Al, appeared in it along with other ancestors. They all ate at a table in the middle of the ocean, and her father sang of his failure, cautioning against chasing after outside approval, repeating the phrase \u201cSuccess is not the test.\u201d A wave crashed over them, and Zollar knew what she had to do.<\/p>\n
She created Urban Bush Women<\/a>, a performance ensemble that tells stories based in the African diaspora from a female perspective. The group is now celebrating its 40th anniversary.<\/p>\n External markers of success may not be the test, but Zollar, 73, has gathered plenty, especially in the last few years. In 2021, she was named a MacArthur fellow, joining a club associated with genius.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve worked without concern about awards,\u201d Zollar said recently at the company\u2019s Brooklyn headquarters. \u201cBut when these things came, I found it affirming. It\u2019s recognition that this work has been happening. And it has allowed me to think expansively about my own future.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n That future will include new artistic endeavors, perhaps along the lines of \u201cIntelligence,\u201d<\/a> the Jake Heggie opera she directed and choreographed for Houston Grand Opera last year. But she is stepping away from the institution she founded.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In 2019, she handed over the role of artistic director of Urban Bush Women to two company members, Chanon Judson and Mame Diarra Speis. And at Bard SummerScape on Friday, she will debut what she has said is her final work for the troupe, \u201cScat! \u2026 The Complex Lives of Al & Dot, Dot & Al Zollar.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n Zollar is careful to stress that \u201cScat!\u201d isn\u2019t a straight biography of her parents. \u201cI\u2019ve had to tell my family that I\u2019m making up things,\u201d she said. While the show is based in research, she calls it a \u201critual resemblance\u201d or a \u201ccritical fabulation,\u201d borrowing a term from the scholar Saidiya Hartman.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s family stories,\u201d Zollar said, \u201cAl and Dot as mythic characters.\u201d<\/p>\n At its core, \u201cScat!\u201d is about the Great Migration, when many Black Southerners moved north or west. \u201cThey thought that life would be better in those places,\u201d Zollar said, \u201cbut they discovered that they were still up against the same thing. It\u2019s about dashed dreams.\u201d The show alludes to the Langston Hughes poem<\/a> that asks what happens to a dream deferred.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cMy mother was a jazz singer and dancer,\u201d Zollar said. \u201cShe would\u2019ve liked to have been a professional, but the story she told was that she was considered too dark.\u201d Zollar\u2019s father was a striver, always hustling.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n For the piece\u2019s form, Zollar draws on her childhood in Kansas City, Mo. \u201cI grew up doing what they called floor shows or revues,\u201d she said. At social events in the Black community, like a dance for Black postal employees, there would be a live band and a package of entertainment: a comic emcee, a flash act, a tap dancer, a blues singer, an exotic dancer and maybe a kid act like Zollar\u2019s, precociously performing jazz dance. This variety-show format gives \u201cScat!\u201d its setting, structure and style.<\/p>\n For music, the show has an original score by the veteran trombonist Craig Harris<\/a>, played by a jazz band that includes three vocalists who do sometimes scat. The music is inspired by the tradition of Kansas City jazz \u2014 Count Basie, Charlie Parker \u2014 but \u201cit\u2019s an evolution of that period,\u201d Harris said in an interview. \u201cIt\u2019s moving that tradition on.\u201d Zollar\u2019s choreography could be described similarly, drawing on vernacular dances of the time \u2014 the Shorty George, the Suzy Q \u2014 but pushing them in new directions.<\/p>\n Both Harris and Zollar emphasized that the work is not a period piece. \u201cWe go back and forth in time,\u201d she said. Multiple dancers play Al and Dot. It ends with Zollar recounting her dream.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n That\u2019s fitting, since the show serves as a sort of origin tale for Urban Bush Women. \u201cWhen I got to college to study modern dance and ballet, I saw that I had a voice outside of those forms,\u201d Zollar said. It wasn\u2019t only that she wanted to hold onto the Black vernacular dance of her youth. She was also interested in experimental ensemble theater and magical realism, in embodying narrative in complex and nonlinear ways.<\/p>\n \u201cIn many Africanist and other worldviews,\u201d she said, \u201cthe past, present and future exist together and communicate with one another. That colors a lot of my work.\u201d<\/p>\n From the start, jazz ensembles were a model. In Urban Bush Women, each dancer is part of the group but she must also have a strong solo voice. In auditions, Zollar said, \u201cYou have to know that they can hold a point of view that is unique, that they have a sound.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI feel that in contemporary dance now, there\u2019s too much homogenization,\u201d she continued. \u201cIt\u2019s like everybody\u2019s a soprano, like everybody\u2019s in one range.\u201d<\/p>\n In Urban Bush Women performances, she said, \u201cthe idea is not to make it exactly the same every time. When I see the company get rote, I tell them they\u2019re not investigating. There\u2019s a structure, but if I do something a little different, you have to respond to that. Sometimes I don\u2019t use the term improvisation. I call it living in the moment.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Harris, who has known Zollar for nearly 50 years and has collaborated with her many times, said that working with the dancers of Urban Bush Women was like working with musicians.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cJawole composes like an improviser, always leaving room for the spirit,\u201d he said. \u201cShe is very specific about what she wants, but she welcomes you to bring something else. It\u2019s risk taking, but it\u2019s informed risk. We\u2019ve been doing this a long time.\u201d<\/p>\n At the beginning of Urban Bush Women, Zollar recalled, \u201cthere was no money, no infrastructure, just me producing.\u201d She found freedom in that, she said. Whatever she wanted to do, she did, even as she encountered resistance. (\u201cPeople said, \u2018You dance like men.\u2019 We would get that a lot,\u201d she said.) Over time, though, she developed an organization. \u201cAnd I accomplished a lot with that to support me,\u201d she said, but it also grew to feel stifling.<\/p>\n As long as 20 years ago, she was already talking about finding a way out. At one point, she considered disbanding the company. \u201cBut there was too much legacy and things to be built upon, so that didn\u2019t feel right,\u201d she said. Finally, after she saw how Judson and Speis choreographed the work \u201cHair & Other Stories,\u201d she thought: \u201cOh, they\u2019re ready. This is the moment.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThere was a bold, audacious vision, different than mine, and a fearlessness,\u201d Zollar said. \u201cThat\u2019s what can carry something forward.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Speis said she wasn\u2019t surprised that she and Judson were tapped. She had joined the company in 2008, Judson in 2001. Both had left for a while and returned in 2013. Speis choreographed a work with Zollar. \u201cWe were developing as leaders without having the title,\u201d Speis said. Zollar was preparing them.<\/p>\n Taking over felt like a natural outgrowth, Speis said. \u201cIn Urban Bush Women, everyone is an active member,\u201d she added. \u201cYou continue to hone and deepen and unearth your gifts as an artist, and the space supports that.\u201d<\/p>\n Speis remembered discovering the company in college. \u201cHere was this ensemble of Black women who were so deeply different yet in harmony with each other,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was a visceral experience, like I had permission to reclaim parts of myself that had been diminished when I entered a formal dance space.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Judson described the Urban Bush Women experience similarly. \u201cI had to put ballet and modern on the shelf and recall what I learned in church and from being a Black girl on the street,\u201d she said. \u201cI learned how to become virtuosic inside of that and also integrate it with what I learned in school.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat\u2019s important is that Jawole isn\u2019t saying \u2018Be Jawole,\u201d Speis said. \u201cShe created this container that says, \u2018Figure out what it is that you do.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In this way, Urban Bush Women keeps going, more financially stable than ever thanks to a $3 million grant from the philanthropist MacKenzie Scott. \u201cScat!\u201d travels next to the American Dance Festival<\/a> in North Carolina, where Zollar will add to her lifetime achievement awards. More 40th anniversary events happen in July at Lincoln Center\u2019s Summer for the City<\/a>. What the company calls its diaspora continues to grow and spread.<\/p>\n And Zollar? \u201cI\u2019m now able to do more things outside of what people think of me,\u201d she said. When she collaborated recently with the performance artist Taylor Mac, people were surprised, she said: \u201cAnd I was like, \u2018You don\u2019t know me!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n