Bard SummerScape 2024: Premiere of Urban Bush Woman's "SCAT!"
Company:
Urban Bush Woman
The Fisher Center at Bard, one of the country’s leading multidisciplinary producing houses, offering extraordinary support to artists to realize ambitious and visionary projects, announces SummerScape 2024, June 20 – August 18, 2024. The festival, a “hotbed of intellectual and aesthetic adventure” (New York Times), brings eight weeks of live music, opera, dance, and theater to the Hudson River Valley. It also serves as an incubator for adventurous works that often go on to have extended lives and make significant impacts on the performance landscape in New York and around the country and world. This season, The Fisher Center presents work from iconic New York companies, including Urban Bush Women.
Urban Bush Women
SCAT!
A New Dance-Driven Jazz Club Spectacular
SummerScape Commission/World Premiere
Conception, Direction, and Choreography by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar
Original Music Composed and Performed by Craig Harris
June 28–30
Building upon a repertoire of bold, life-affirming dance works, Urban Bush Women celebrates their 40th anniversary with a new dance-driven jazz club spectacular that tells the story of two people making their way through a journey from the Great Migration to Kansas City to the present. Urban Bush Women founder Jawole Willa Jo Zollar grew up performing in floor shows in Black neighborhoods in a segregated Kansas City in the mid-20th century—an era when Black businesses were booming, and there was great hope of upward mobility post-WWII. Performed with a live band to an original jazz score by Craig Harris, this world premiere tells the powerful journey of the Zollar family and what happens when dreams encounter the harsh realities of American life in the 1940s & 50s.
There will be a post-performance party celebrating Urban Bush Women’s 40th Anniversary on Friday, June 28, and a pre-performance talk on Sunday, June 30, at 2 pm; round-trip transportation from NYC will be available on Sunday, June 30.
About Jawole Willa Jo Zollar
“Jawole Willa Jo Zollar has had a consistent and innovative interest in mining tradition and creating new ritual.”—New York Times
Jawole Willa Jo Zollar began a relationship with the Fisher Center in 2020, working with director Daniel Fish on the 2020 production Most Happy in Concert. Growing up in Kansas City, Missouri, she earned her B.A. in dance from the University of Missouri at Kansas City and her M.F.A. in dance from Florida State University. In 1980 Jawole moved to New York City to study with Dianne McIntyre at Sounds in Motion. In 1984 Jawole founded Urban Bush Women (UBW) as a performance ensemble dedicated to exploring the use of cultural expression as a catalyst for social change.
In addition to creating over 34 works for Urban Bush Women, Zollar has created works for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Philadanco, and many universities across the United States. Her collaborations include Compagnie Jant-Bi from Senegal and Nora Chipaumire. She was choreographer of Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of American Popular Music. In 2023, Zollar was commissioned by Houston Grand Opera to direct and choreograph a new Jake Heggie opera, Intelligence.
Urban Bush Women has toured five continents and was selected as one of three U.S. dance companies to inaugurate a cultural diplomacy program for the U.S. Department of State in 2010. Zollar serves as director of the UBW Summer Leadership Institute, founding and visioning partner of Urban Bush Women, and as the Nancy Smith Fichter Professor of Dance and Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor at Florida State University. Zollar has been a United States Artists Wynn fellow and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial fellow. She holds honorary degrees from Columbia College Chicago, Tufts University, Rutgers University, and Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA.
Zollar has received the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, the Dance Magazine Award, the Dance/USA Honor Award, the “Bessie” Lifetime Achievement in Dance Award for her work in the field, the Dance Teacher Award of Distinction, and the Martha Hill Dance Fund Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2020, The Ford Foundation declared Urban Bush Women one of America’s Cultural Treasures. Zollar has recently been awarded a 2021 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellow, the 2022 APAP Honors Award of Merit for Achievement in the Performing Arts and the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize.
About Craig Harris
Craig Harris exploded onto the jazz scene in 1976, bringing the entire history of the jazz trombone with him. Craig handled the total vernacular the way a skilled orator utilizes the spoken word. He has performed with a veritable Who’s Who of progressive jazz’s most important figures, and his own projects display both a unique sense of concept and a total command of the sweeping expanse of musical expression. Those two qualities have dominated Craig’s forty years of activity, bringing him beyond the confines of the jazz world into multimedia and performance art as a composer, performer, conceptualist, music curator, and artistic director. Craig, who comes from a tradition of art as cultural facilitation to help promote change, has employed his musical voice to comment on social injustice with projects including God’s Trombones, based on James Weldon Johnson’s book of sermons; Souls Within the Veil commemorating the centennial of W.E.B. DuBois’s seminal work; TriHarlenium, a sound portrait and 30-year musical time capsule of Harlem; and Brown Butterfly, a tribute to the exquisite movements of Muhammad Ali.
About Urban Bush Women (UBW)
Urban Bush Women (UBW) galvanizes artists, activists, audiences, and communities through performances, artist development, education, and community engagement. With the ground-breaking performance ensemble at its core and ongoing programs, including the Summer Leadership Institute (SLI), BOLD (Builders, Organizers & Leaders through Dance), and the Choreographic Center Initiative, UBW affects the overall ecology of the arts by promoting artistic legacies; projecting the voices of the under-heard and people of color; bringing attention to and addressing issues of equity in the dance field and throughout the United States; and by providing platforms and serving as a conduit for culturally and socially relevant experimental art makers.
Photo by Rick McCullough
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