Urban Bush Women (UBW) are artists in residence at WCMA Oct. 2–6, in partnership with the Williams College Dance Department, Think Large, Inc., in loving memory of Dr. Don Quinn Kelley, and our Berkshire-based Community Participants, exploring how their latest work, Haint Blu, can be produced in a museum context. Haint Blu is an ensemble dance-theater work steeped in memory and magic, and during this week, members of UBW will collaborate with Pallavi Sen in her solo exhibition, Colour Theory.
Celebrating 40 years, Urban Bush Women is a groundbreaking Black women-led theatrical dance company and social activism ensemble, founded in 1984 by visionary choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zollar as an engine and an amplifier for the unheard stories of Black Women+. Today, under the artistic leadership of Chanon Judson and Mame Diarra Speis, UBW combines revolutionary performance, deep-healing community engagement, and ancestral knowledge from the African diaspora into a cultural force that is urgent, forward-looking, and essential.
UBW has defied expectations and easy categorization with its bold, narrative storytelling. The very bodies of the seven founding members of UBW—Black women of various shapes and sizes—challenged and changed the landscape of who could be seen on stage as a dancer. The subject matter of the work placed the stories of such women, historically overlooked and undervalued in America, front and center stage. Similarly, UBW remains committed to ensuring that underserved audiences, especially people of color who face systemic barriers to accessing conventional performance, are engaged, invited, and made welcome wherever the company tours.
UBW embraces the power of radical storytelling to activate social change. Whether creating genre-defying work for the stage, guiding the development of Black Women+ choreographers and producers, organizing for justice through art-making, or inspiring leaders across generations, UBW is an innovator, operating at the vanguard.
