In 1984, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar founded the Urban Bush Women, which has since become an important part of the American dance landscape. For Zollar, dance is a powerful means of working toward social justice. Thus, in addition to performing on concert dance stages across the globe, her company has become a model for arts activism through its Community Engagement Projects, Summer Dance Institute, and other efforts. The Urban Bush Women's performances and workshops reach a broad and diverse audience, though they mostly focus on issues of importance to black women. In Urban Bush Women: Twenty Years of African American Dance Theater, Community Engagement, and Working It Out, Nadine George-Graves analyzes Zollar's unusual approach to dance through the concepts of “work” and “working it out” (3). She argues that the repertoire offers a way to “work through” issues of “race, gender, spirituality, social relations, political power, aesthetics, and community life” and thus leads performers, audiences, and community members to a place of healing (3–4). The Urban Bush Women therefore offer not just a commentary on broader issues, but also an opportunity to engage in the process of creating social change. Through workshop and class participation, interviews, performance analysis, archival research, and the judicious application of critical theory, George-Graves succeeds in proving her argument, and in the process, has written a book that is an important contribution to dance studies.

In the preface, George-Graves explains her embodied methodology. She notes that her highly involved, participatory approach “risks reducing critical analysis to personal impressions that fail to speak to larger issues” (xi). She manages to avoid that pitfall, for her analytic text consistently connects Zollar's choreography to important social and political questions. George-Graves also hopes her book will “negotiate the interstices of academic and public intellectualism in a way similar to Urban Bush Women's negotiation of the spaces between concert dance and community-based work” (xi). Her success in this effort is more uncertain. By using the word “interstices,” she is already employing academic language, pointing to the difficulties that lie ahead for general readers when she invokes Foucauldian subjectivity and Judith Butler's concept of performativity. This is not to say that George-Graves fails to bridge the scholar–general public divide, but rather to acknowledge the difficulty in doing so when one does not want to relinquish the important theoretical tools of analysis that lead to a deeper understanding of dance performance and practice.

Regardless, for dance scholars the book is a valuable contribution for several reasons. Existing scholarship on the Urban Bush Women often focuses on one dance or on a few major themes of the work.Footnote ¹ In contrast, George-Graves provides a comprehensive and much-needed analysis of Zollar's process. The first chapter identifies the choreography's “core values,” which include having female energy at the center, drawing upon African Diasporic ancestral memory, validating different individuals’ bodies and approaches, and offering an aesthetic that is “not about selling” while still retaining an expressive quality and honest engagement with sexuality (12–6). One tension obliquely mentioned in the discussion of the piece “Self-Portrait” would be interesting to investigate further: the fact that so much of this company's identity is entwined with Zollar's personality and vision. George-Graves describes the Urban Bush Women's rehearsal process as collaborative and supportive, but to what extent can the company be a model for community-building and horizontal collaboration when so much is predicated upon one individual?

George-Graves’ analysis is quite rich in this section because she does not shy away from exploring tensions about race, gender, power, artistic freedom, and other issues that emerge in Zollar's work. One of the choreographer's predominant themes is strength, particularly the strength of African American women. The company's dancers all have different body types, but they “all look very strong and they all move from a strong core” (25). While not every piece portrays strong black women, “enough of them play into the narrative that it becomes a hallmark of the choreography” (26). George-Graves notes that an unremitting message of strength can feed into the stereotype of muscular black dancers, a stereotype that historically has been used to disparage or discredit black dancers’ grace, elegance, softness, or balletic abilities. While in other arenas Zollar insists on facing contradictions or complex issues, in this case, the author argues, “The manifestation of uplift is perhaps more valuable than more complicated messages” (26).

The book's middle chapters address four major aspects of Zollar's choreography separately. One chapter focuses on women's bodies, another on the use of storytelling and narrative, a third on the importance of transnational or African Diasporic connections, and a fourth on the repertoire's spirituality. Because most of Zollar's choreography weaves together all of these themes, however, George-Graves’ examples in each chapter can become a bit redundant. For example, her discussion of Shadow's Child appears in the chapter about storytelling, but she also discusses the dance's diasporic connections and its spiritual messages (95–103). Such overlap makes the middle chapters drag at times, but the well-written analysis of almost twenty dances is an important archival accomplishment that helps ensure that Zollar's work will not disappear.

The book also contributes to existing scholarship by focusing on the Urban Bush Women's community activism, not just Zollar's choreography. In Chapter Six, George-Graves draws upon political theorist Benedict Anderson to argue that while all communities are “imagined,” a community imagined into being creates the unity necessary to undo oppression (169–70). Through “hair parties” and children's workshops, Zollar and the Urban Bush Women create communities that talk about issues of race and gender, explore cultural heritage, and exercise creativity. In the Summer Dance Institute, Zollar trains dancers and choreographers to “maximize the possibilities of the arts as a vehicle for social activism and civic engagement” (176). The strongest part of the chapter is the analysis of the Urban Bush Women's Community Engagement Project with the Dixwell neighborhood of New Haven, CT, in which dancers worked with community members to choreograph a piece based on the neighborhood's “living cultural heritage” (183). The dance opened up a space to “work through” issues, but left it to the Dixwell residents to take the next step and apply the conversations to actual problems of gentrification and displacement that they faced. After praising the Urban Bush Women for their reciprocal, thoughtful approach to community work, George-Graves raises a question: “Is jump-starting the conversation enough?” (192). In other words, do artists have the responsibility to offer solutions to social and political problems? She leaves the question unanswered, mirroring Zollar's own approach of asking questions rather than providing answers.

This last point leads to another of George-Graves’ major accomplishments: like the subject of her book, she rarely shies away from complexity or contradiction. Her monograph “works through” the same difficult issues that the Urban Bush Women address through dance. Much as Zollar forces audiences to grapple with questions that are not always resolved harmoniously—or resolved at all—George-Graves invites readers to ponder both the power and limitations of dance as a mode of social justice activism. As such, her book is an invaluable text not only for learning about the Urban Bush Women, but also for expanding our understanding of what dance can do outside the confines of the proscenium stage.

Just as importantly, George-Graves does not allow complexity to lead to muddled confusion. She does have a specific and clear argument: Zollar's message of strength and unity is an important part of what dance can offer the world. The Coda explores the Urban Bush Women's joyous twentieth anniversary season at the Joyce Theater in New York and concludes that the “spirit of celebration and empowerment is valuable and not to be taken lightly” (202). Overall, George-Graves succeeds in honoring the Urban Bush Women without ignoring tensions that can arise during the company's engagement with difficult questions about race, gender, and power. Her carefully researched and well-written book is an important addition to the field for anyone interested in politics and performance, modern/postmodern dance, African American dance, arts activism, community engagement, and a multitude of other areas.