Urban Bush Women

Let’s Dance International Frontiers welcome ground breaking performance ensemble Urban Bush Women (UBW).

Led by the vision of its award-winning founder Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, UBW seeks to bring the untold and under-told histories and stories of the African diaspora to light through dance.

Renowned around the world for their breath-taking performances, the company will be sharing new pieces, alongside iconic work from the past 30 years. Including Walking with ‘Trane Side A inspired by the influential American jazz saxophonist and composer John Coltrane and his seminal work ‘A Love Supreme’, and Nora Chipaumire’s striking choreography dark swan.

Walking with ‘Trane, Side A
Inspired by the musical life and spiritual journey of John Coltrane, a composer at the forefront of jazz innovation in a racially-charged America of the 50s and 60s, Walking with ‘Trane, Side A,‘Just a closer walk with ‘Trane’, is a conjuring of Coltrane’s essence, based in rooted understandings of his music and “known” traditions pushed into heightened performance “states,” from cool to hot, from ancient field hollers to gospel cadences, strange reed riffs drive a spiraling physical journey through echoes of the blues, bebop, hard bop, free jazz, scored in a dazzling array by Phillip White.

Created by Choreographers, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Samantha Speis and Dramaturg, Talvin Wilks in collaboration with the company.

dark swan
Originally choreographed as a striking solo by award-winning choreographer Nora Chipaumire in an effort to respond to and acknowledge contemporary dance’s debt to Russian ballet masters, dark swan is a radical homage to Anna Pavlova’s ‘The Dying Swan’. Meditating on women’s struggle to be free, dark swan interrogates the presentation and representation of the African female body re-imagined as a captivating group performance.