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The company's repertoire includes more directly resistant and celebratory pieces such as Anarchy, Wild Women, and Dinah, which like many UBW works is choreographed in sections. While researching African-American folk tales, in which male trickster figures abound and female tricksters are relatively absent, Zollar discovered the female trickster Dinah. In Anarchy, tales of Dinah's uncompromising recalcitrance combine with Zollar's imaginings about the mischief she brews. Conventions and acknowledged rules of performance are broken with vibrant energy. In fact, even as Zollar invokes Dinah--whom she says is "part of what I would call the wild women's tradition, women who did what they wanted to do, when they wanted to do, how they wanted to do, despite any Supreme Court rulings"--she exits the stage picking her teeth. More important, through the movement and structuring of the piece, Zollar links Dinah's irrepressible spirit with that of the Urban Bush Women and the many women who can identify with them. |
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| Dinah, then, is not a mythical figure located in some distant, imaginary landscape. She is incarnate in the women we see around us. In Anarchy, the Urban Bush Women perform a robust celebration of that spirit of resistance with energetic singing and dancing in sections such as "Dinah" and "Wild Women Don't Get the Blues," which are replete with fast, intricate footwork, complex rhythms, swiveling hips, circling shoulders, plunging arms, and kicking legs. The women even enjoy a short meal on stage, chewing noisily and sitting comfortably with their legs open and their backs loose. They recognize, however, that this spirit is undercut by the adversities and afflictions of everyday life. | |||||||||
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