Urban Bush Women!

Photos courtesy of Enid Bloch--thanks Enid! Visit her website, it's super!


On Friday night, I witnessed a performance that was so life-changingly fantastic, it derailed my entire expected blog flow. No, seriously, I am so committed to this thing that I actually think ahead and make plans about what I’ll probably post about next, and even sometimes two posts in advance. Well, this was a rare two post-er time, but actually it was a bit foolish of me, because I was planning to attend this performance of the Urban Bush Women dance company for, literally, MONTHS, and I should have known that I would obviously want to post about it an planned accordingly. But, since I didn’t, everything else has come to a screeching halt as I realized from the moment I walked in the theatre that I absolutely HAD to tell you about these amazing women.

Oh, yeah, but what about that dratted and oft-noted fact that I cannot, cannot! seem to speak articulately where dance is concerned. Well, thank the good Lord, there is plenty else to begin with in speaking of this particular performance, and maybe the rest will come in time. First of all it must be said that, for the first time in my 23, almost 24 years, I was at a performance sitting in the VERY FIRST ROW. I actually didn’t believe it when they sent me to hunt for my seat, and had to double check with one of the ushers before I felt worthy to take my place. I was also a little concerned, because you know how in some venues, the actual stage is so high that people in the first row literally can’t see over the stage? Well, this was not the case in this venue, which I love anyway for being a fairly intimate setting, considering the relatively high caliber of the folks who perform there. ANYWAY, it was not that kind of venue and the view was so spectacular. I sat down next to this woman and, still off-kilter from the shock, immediately started a conversation with her about the first row and how amazed I was to be there. Then I proceeded to ask her about her very large looking camera which she informed me was not actually a very large camera, but a camera in a very large apparatus designed to keep it from making noise and disrupting the performance. So we were chatting about her photography and then at intermission she showed me two books she had published of photos of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and then at the end of the evening I gave her my card and she said she would send me some of the photos when she had gone through them! And, since she had showed me some photos during intermission on her camera’s screen, I have every confidence that they are going to be fantastic. Maybe I will frame them…anyway, those are the first two fantastic things that happened.



The performance itself was…incredible. It was divided into two sections, the first performance being a kind of homage to victims of Hurricane Katrina (Enid told me at intermission that the way that the dancers were only lit above waist level signified the water level.) The second was a dance-exploration through excerpts from a woman’s journal, chronicling her experiences in Africa. I loved the grittiness of the first piece, the way that there was no sets, no costumes, the dancers just wore extremely casual street clothes. Even the music was extremely minimalistic, they had a percussionist on stage who would at times be only tapping out a basic rhythm on a single drum. At other times the dancers were moving in complete silence, sometimes in UNISON in complete silence, which blew my mind. I realized that the way they signaled a big change in movement to each other was that a lead dancer would give a sharp exhalation of breath. That was the other thing—the proximity to the dancers and the times of silence made the whole experience so immediate. You could hear their breathing, sometimes in a studied, unison sort of way, but sometimes just the labored breathing of athletes, you could hear the squeak as a dancers toe or knee would slide across the floor. The absolute most fantastic thing about the first piece is that, at the end, three dancers left the stage and came back with white handkerchiefs for themselves and the other dancers and the drum struck up a beat with the cymbals and all the women were dancing and twirling their handkerchiefs and it felt like Mardi Gras, and really drove home the point that there was rebirth, there was unity and there was something to be celebrated.

The second piece had a completely different look, still no scenery, but the outfits that the women wore were much more flowy and almost every outfit strongly incorporated the color red, which, combined with the lights, was so luminous. It just made me very happy, I have been very strongly drawn to the color red lately. Not sure what that means. If I figure it out, I’ll let you know. This dance also had more influence of African dance, as far as I could tell, whereas the first piece was more straight contemporary dance. The dancers provided some of their own accompaniment through chanting and having the majority of the dancers stomp out a rhythm that one or two others would actually dance to. There were also several dance circles, where one woman would dance in the center and they would switch off. That was another thing I really appreciated about this company, was that there were no divas, no stars, it was very communal in everything from the roles women took in the dances to making sure that people had more or less equal time in the spotlight.

The other thing that was absolutely fantastic for me about this performance was that I found it so affirming as a dancer. Lately, I tend to watch performances and divide moves into categories: Things I Can Do, Things I Can’t Do. But one of the wonderful things about this performance was that it was contemporary, so for much of the performance it was watching my kind of dancing. I also think that I have been oppressed by the model of the Western ballerina, stick thin with perfect arches and perfectly toned, but tiny, arms and legs. I loved that these women looked like real women, with hips and thick, muscular thighs and calves, like hey, we do hard stuff, dammit! We can’t do this stuff with little twigs for limbs! I also loved that, being so close, I could see that their foot wobbled back and forth when they were balancing on one leg, just like mine does when I’m balancing, that their leg would start shaking when they held it in the air for awhile just like mine does. It all created this impression that these are real people, no superhuman dynamos, doing impossible feats of terpsichore. All in all, I wanted to run screaming after them as they left the stage: “Wait! Wait! Take me with you! I’m sorry I’m not Black! But I’m still a chick! I’ll do anything, move to New York, live in the cellar, eat bugs, just let me come with you and dance like you dance!!!” I would have, in fact, but I couldn’t find them after the performance. Tricky security measures. Maybe someday… but I think that the whole evening really made me have hope that I could someday, perhaps even now, consider myself a Real Dancer. I have a great many thoughts on what it means to be a Real Dancer and why I generally cannot consider myself to be one, but those are for another time as this post is already absurdly long, and so, I say farewell!

S.