University of Florida Performing Arts

World Premiere

To read the program, click here.

To read an article about Urban Bush Women that appeared in Dance Magazine, click here.

To watch a video about the collaborative process, click here. (Produced by the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography.)

Germaine Acogny (Compagnie Jant-Bi) and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar (Urban Bush Women) will appear as part of the post-screening panel of the Gainesville film premiere of Movement (R)evolution Africa.  For more information, click here.

Les écailles de la mémoire (The Scales of Memory), is an evening-length collaboration between choreographers Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Germaine Acogny and their respective companies - the seven women of Urban Bush Women and the seven men of Compagnie Jant-Bi of Senegal.  The dance explores the themes of resistance, memory and love.

This international exchange has allowed the two choreographers to explore one another’s methodology.  Both Zollar and Acogny work from a perspective which Zollar explains “uses heightened emotions and magnifies humanity to define form and content.  It operates on the basis that there is no identity without community.”

University of Florida Performing Arts will host the world premiere of this international collaboration befores it tours to other cities in the United States.

About Urban Bush Women

Founded in 1984 by choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Urban Bush Women is proudly based in Brooklyn, New York.  UBW has been presented extensively in New York City and has toured throughout the United States and to Asia, Australia, Europe and South America.  Festival appearances include Jacob’s Pillow, Spoleto USA, National Black Arts Festival, Dance Umbrella UK and Lincoln Center Festival.  The company has been commissioned by major presenters nationwide, and counts among its honors a 1992 New York Dance and Performance Award (“Bessie”); the 1994 Capezio Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dance; and 1998 and 2005 Doris Duke Award for New Work from the American Dance Festival. 

The Urban Bush Women repertory consists of over 30 works choreographed by Zollar including ambitious collaborations with jazz artist David Murray; poets Laurie Carlos and Carl Hancock Rux; directors Steve Kent and Elizabeth Herron; and the National Song and Dance Company of Mozambique (supported by The Ford Foundation’s African Exchange Program).  Long-term community engagement residencies culminating in public performances have been undertaken in New Orleans, Sarasota, Philadelphia, New Haven, Tallahassee, Riverside (California), Flint (Michigan) and Brooklyn, New York.  Urban Bush Women also produces an annual Summer Institute for training artists and activists in UBW community engagement techniques and continues to develop innovative programs for young people.

About Compagnie Jant-Bi

The Company Jant-Bi was created in 1998, with dancers who had participated in the first professional workshop of the International Center for Traditional and Contemporary African Dances, L’Ecole des Sables, in Toubab Dialaw (Senegal), under the artistic direction of the Senegalese dancer and choreographer Germaine Acogny.

The first choreography of the Company, Le coq est mort, was created for eight dancers (six Senegalese, one Congolese and one Nigerian) in 1999, by the German choreographer Susanne Linke and the Israeli co-choreographer Avi Kaiser. This creation has been presented in Europe and in the United States, in places as prestigious as the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris, the New Dance Festival in Montreal and the Jacob’s Pillow Festival  in the United States. It permits to give to L’Ecole des Sables a real acknowledgement of its work.
Thanks to this piece, a new image of the contemporary creation in Africa has been spread worldwide. 

In 2003, Germaine Acogny, strongly touched by the genocide of Rwanda, created a new work, to raise awareness of what happened in Rwanda in the hope that such atrocities would never be committed again.  In a collaboration with Kota Yamazaki (Japan), they combined elements of Butoh and Traditional and Contemporary African Dances to find a symbolic language of pain and hope.  Fagaala has already met a great success during its tours in the United States, Brazil, Germany, Luxemburg, Netherlands, Italy, Senegal, South Africa and recently in Australia.

Funded in part by the National Dance Project of the New England Foundation for the Arts, with lead funding from Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.  Additional funding provided by The Ford Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and JP Morgan Chase Foundation.