Urban Bush Women get to the roots of hair and Black identity in new work

The emotionally fraught status of Black women’s hair isn’t exactly news. Over the past two decades there have been at least half a dozen documentaries and numerous books exploring the ways in which Western beauty standards impose on the self-image of Black women, like Chris Rock’s 2009 documentary “Good Hair” as well as “The Hair Tales,” a new docuseries by “Black-ish” star Tracee Ellis Ross and journalist Michaela Angela Davis.

Urban Bush Women, the Brooklyn-based dance theater troupe, have been untangling this particular follicular phenomenon since 2001’s “HairStories,” a work created by the company’s founder (and 2021 MacArthur Fellow) Jawole Willa Jo Zollar.

While Urban Bush Women has traveled numerous times to the Bay Area, this weekend marks the troupe’s first appearance here in more than a decade. The company is coming to Zellerbach Playhouse Dec. 1-3 to perform “Hair & Other Stories.” The performance, presented by Cal Performances, is the Bay Area premiere of a participatory dance-theater work exploring race, identity, and notions of beauty via the lens of Black women’s hair.

For the Dec. 1 show, Cal Performances is offering live audio description for blind and visually impaired audience members, a service that will be available at select future Cal Performances events.

Urban Bush Women started to develop “Hair & Other Stories” back in 2017, “and there’s definitely a direct connection between ‘HairStories’ and the new work, looking at stories that are connected to what we’re grappling with today in society and our personal lives,” said Courtney Cook, the company’s associate director.

Choreographed and directed by co-artistic directors Chanon Judson and Mame Diarra Speis, “Hair & Other Stories” draws on personal narratives gathered from participants at “Hair Party” sessions that the company held across the country, as well as through the group’s ongoing collaboration with “Undoing Racism,” a series of workshops held by New Orleans-based People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond.

“In this piece we definitely want people to look within and discover their hair stories,” said dancer Mikaila Ware. “It definitely has some hard truths, but also some comedic moments. There are moments when we’ll do call and response with the audience, and moments when we’re getting the audience to stand and move and sing with us.”

It’s hard to overstate the centrality of hair for Black women, who often still face workplace pushback for wearing their hair natural or locked up. The cost of upkeep can be a serious expense, and it’s no coincidence that one of the first self-made Black female millionaires was Madam C. J. Walker (1867–1919), a cosmetics and hair-care entrepreneur who was a major supporter of education and the arts.

So have the issues advanced or changed since the original “HairStories” production?

Not much, according to Cook. “I feel like the conversation is almost the same, but we are peeling back layers of systemic oppression, looking at how these systems work and how they are still at play. It’s not just about whether hair is natural or straight, even within the Black community, we’re looking at colorism, texturism, these small internalized ways we have of creating hierarchies of what is inferior.”

While Urban Bush Women haven’t had many opportunities to perform in the Bay Area in recent years, the company’s influence has been deeply felt, particularly through the work of Oakland choreographer and producer Amara Tabor Smith, an early Urban Bush Women dancer who went on to serve as associate artistic director. A longtime creative force on the Bay Area dance scene, she’s an artist in residence at Stanford University whose company Deep Waters Dance Theater has become the primary vehicle for what she calls her Afrofuturist conjure art.

Last month, Urban Bush Women played a key role in Houston Grand Opera’s world premiere of “Intelligence,” by San Francisco composer Jake Heggie. Not that the influence flows only in one direction. Urban Bush Women dancer Ware, who was raised in Georgia, cites her summer intensive with Alonzo King’s Lines Ballet as a formative experience during her college years.

She came in focused on contemporary ballet, and at Lines, “we learned the repertory all day for four weeks and then worked with Alonzo, and I came away with the ability to express more emotionality, to tap more into senses and textures and explore with that,” she said. “We took other genres, and I got into hip-hop and African dance, these other forms that complimented and expanded our expression.”

Contact Andrew Gilbert at jazzscribe@aol.com.