Virginia Arts Festival Presents Urban Bush Women in the World Premiere Performance of HAIR AND OTHER STORIES

The Virginia Arts Festival presents Brooklyn-based Dance Company Urban Bush Women (UBW) in the world premiere of Hair and Other Stories on Saturday, April 22 at 8 p.m. at the Attucks Theatre in Norfolk, Virginia. Tickets are $20-$35, available online at vafest.org, by phone at 757-282-2822 or at the Virginia Arts Festival box, 440 Bank St., Norfolk (10 a.m. and 5 p.m., Monday-Friday).

Urban Bush Women's Hair and Other Stories is a multidisciplinary work that addresses how one's self-image is formed through perceptions of family, history, identity, and values. This often humorous, sometimes poignant, always compelling piece combines dance with storytelling, and builds on conversations with the audience.

The new work has roots in the past: Hair and Other Stories grows out of a 2001 multi-media piece exploring race, gender, and cultural identity. "With the original work, we set out to explore the place of hair in women's lives, and its relationship to ideas about beauty, social position, heritage, and self-esteem," says Urban Bush Women Artistic Director Jawole Willa Jo Zollar. In keeping with UBW's core value of community engagement, the company hosted "Hair Parties" in private and public spaces, which not only provided performance material, but also created a framework for dialogue that went beyond the performance itself. The topic of hair offered a "way in" to issues like race, social status, gender, sexuality, and economics.

"It was a story that would not let me rest," says Zollar, who notes that the issues that arose in the creation of Hair Stories persist, as does the need to continue the conversation. So she decided to write a new chapter. In Urban Bush Women terms, that meant gathering a team of creatives, company dancers, and community members to build a new work from the ground up, including Zollar, UBW Associate Artistic Directors Chanon Judson and Samantha Speis, and Director Raelle Myrick-Hodges.

The team discovered that when it comes to such issues as race, physical appearance, and self-image, where the discussion takes place determines the course of the conversation. While taking part in real conversations throughout the community in homes, beauty and barber shops, and work places, Zollar and her collaborators became fascinated with the idea of how those held in living rooms are often more formal, differing from "kitchen talk," where truth-telling is offered up like healthy portions of food. And that sparked the design of the new work.

"With Hair and Other Stories, UBW and its audiences will journey through Curated Living Room Conversations and Truth-Telling Kitchen Talk to explore the ways in which appearance defines perception," says Judson.

"We are envisioning a 'jazz funeral' for assumptions and practices we need to let die and bury," explains Zollar. "That is the visceral, intellectual, and transcendent power of art: to drive conversation and foster change."

The company is polishing the new work in a process that will take them from their own studios in Brooklyn to the historic Attucks Theatre in Norfolk, where they will put the finishing touches on the world premiere. It's an opportunity that Virginia Arts Festival Artistic Director Robert Cross finds intensely exciting, and one in keeping with the Festival's own mission. "To present this bold company for the first time in a space like the Attucks Theatre, which echoes with so much artistry and history-that's a chance of a lifetime," says Cross.

The Festival presents dozens of performances in coastal Virginia annually, and also fulfills its strong commitment to arts education by dispatching visiting performers to area schools, many of which serve economically challenged communities. UBW will conduct dance masterclasses for students studying dance, give workshops in area schools to introduce students to their art, and engage students in community conversations about race and identity designed to inform Hair and Other Stories, as well as other new works. Some events will combine different aspects of UBW's work, allowing students access to great artistic content as well as insightful dialogue about social issues. This collaborative approach to education will enable the Festival and Urban Bush Women to reach area students in different ways, each opportunity constructed to leave a rich and lasting impact.

About Urban Bush Women

Founded in 1984 by choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Urban Bush Women (UBW) seeks to bring the untold and under-told histories and stories of disenfranchised people to light through dance. UBW does this from a woman-centered perspective and as members of the African Diaspora community in order to create a more equitable balance of power in the dance world and beyond. As UBW celebrates its 33rd year, it continues to use dance as both the message and the medium to bring together diverse audiences through innovative choreography, community collaboration and artistic leadership development.

About Virginia Arts Festival

Since 1997, the Virginia Arts Festival has transformed the cultural scene in southeastern Virginia, presenting great performers from around the world to local audiences and making this historic, recreation-rich region a cultural destination for visitors from across the United States and around the world. The Festival has presented numerous U.S. and regional premieres, and regularly commissions new works of music, dance, and theater from some of today's most influential composers, choreographers and playwrights. The Festival's arts education programs reach tens of thousands of area schoolchildren each year through student matinees, in-school performances, artists' residencies, master classes and demonstrations.

About the Attucks Theatre

Known in its heyday as the "Apollo Theatre of the South," the Attucks Theatre is distinguished as the oldest remaining legitimate theatre in the United States that was completely financed, designed, constructed and operated by African Americans. It was named in honor of African-American Crispus Attucks, the first American patriot to lose his life in the 1770 Boston Massacre.

The Attucks Theatre opened in 1919, and through the first half of the 20th century, showcased a host of legendary performers such as Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Mamie Smith, Nat King Cole, and Redd Foxx. Hard times fell on the Attucks in the early 1950s, and for more than half a century, the Attucks remained shuttered, despite being designated as a National Historic Landmark by the U.S. Congress. The Attucks Theatre was reopened in 2004 through a partnership between the City of Norfolk's Department of Cultural Facilities and the Crispus Attucks Cultural Center, Inc., and now hosts performances and community events year-round.

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