Forty Years of Urban Bush Women

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar is a risk-taker. Soft-spoken and elegant, she is confident in the choices she has made in the past and the legacy she is overseeing for the future. 

In addition to being a Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor and Nancy Smith Fichter Professor of Dance at Florida State University, Zollar is the founder of Urban Bush Women (UBW), a world-renowned dance company that uses cultural expression as a catalyst for social change—and the world has taken notice.

In 2024, Urban Bush Women marked its fortieth year as a company celebrating the “power of dance” seen in the African diaspora. During its four-decade history, UBW has toured five continents, inaugurated state department programs for cultural diplomacy, created works for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre and Philadanco, and performed nationally at theaters from the Los Angeles Music Center’s Mark Taper Forum to the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Zollar performing in the The Complex Lives of Al & Dot, Dot & Al Zollar, a dance-driven musical she conceived, directed, and choreographed, that tells the love story of two people making their way during the Great Migration. Photo by Maria Baranova

But how did a little girl born in inner-city Kansas come to found a New York-based dance company, become a professor at a major university, receive dozens of national awards, and hold four honorary doctorates from the likes of Columbia College Chicago, Tufts, Rutgers, and Muhlenberg College? Zollar herself simply smiles and says, “I just followed my love of dance.”

Dance was always in the picture. Zollar says that her mother had been a cabaret dancer in the 1930s, and her children were provided “community dance lessons.” One teacher was the then-famous jazz dancer Pepsi Bethel, an African American performer known for elevating the Lindy Hop to the stage. Little Jawole performed in recitals and marched in her school’s drill team, already knowing when she headed to college that she wanted to continue dancing.

“I actually came late to the formal study of dance,” she says. Ballet and modern dance forms hadn’t been emphasized, but she loved the “rigor” of study. When Zollar received her degree from the University of Missouri in Kansas City, she says: “I really had no goal—I only knew I needed, and wanted, to study more.” 

Zollar earned her MFA in dance at Florida State, where she “fell in love with Tallahassee—its trees and Spanish moss.” She also became familiar with a type of racism she had not experienced before, but the greater world was calling.

Zollar began studies with the brilliant African American dance pioneer Dianne McIntyre. Working as a hat check girl, an apartment cleaner, and other study-supporting jobs in the Big Apple, Zollar was not only perfecting her craft, but in 1984, she started inviting others to participate in her own ensemble that would become Urban Bush Women.

Using mostly percussion and voice, UBW explores feminist themes, racism, sexism, abortion, homelessness … even “hair.” 

↗ Urban Bush Women in Women’s Resistance and ↓ I Don’t Know, but I Been Told, If You Keep on Dancin’ You Never Grow Old. UBW began in New York City on June 30, 1984, self-presented by Zollar. Photo by Hayim Heron

“UBW uses African aesthetics to speak about the experiences of Black people—truth-telling is behind what we do,” Zollar says. In more than 50 dance works, she has told those stories.

Meanwhile, she has not mentioned any of her awards: the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award; the Dance/USA Honor Award; the “Bessie” Lifetime Achievement in Dance Award; the 2021 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellow; the 2022 APAP Honors Award of Merit for Achievement in the Performing Arts; the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize; the 2024 Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award for lifetime achievement; and many, many more. 

Instead, Zollar talks about the fortieth anniversary season of UBW, titled “This Is Risk.” She relinquished the running of the company during COVID, but the original risk taker has no plans for cutting back.  

“We’re still spreading the gospel of dance,” she says. 

And the rest of us are the grateful beneficiaries.