Urban Bush Women present the 2019 Summer Leadership Institute Culminating Performance livestreaming on the global, commons-based peer produced HowlRound TV network at howlround.tv on Saturday 20 July at 4 p.m. EDT (New York) / 3 p.m. CDT (Chicago) / 1 p.m. PDT (Los Angeles) add to Google calendar, and then again at 7:15 p.m. EDT (New York) / 6:15 p.m. CDT (Chicago) / 4:15 p.m. (Los Angeles) add to Google calendar.
UBW will host two SLI Culminating Performances on Saturday, July 20, 2019 at 4 pm and 7:15 pm at Gibney, 280 Broadway. The Culminating Public Performances include all participants and use music, dance, theater, visual design and spoken word to address this year’s theme When Black Women (+) Prevail, UBWAll Prevail: Erased No More”. Please visit Urban Bush Women’s website for more information about the 2019 Summer Leadership Institute.
This summer, Urban Bush Women (UBW) is using physical and verbal dialogue, creative and choreographic tools, panels, readings, and embodied research to investigate the effects of Black women(+)’s* leadership on the United States. UBW will center the leadership of Black Women (+) to learn and study organizing & artistic strategies from the lives of individuals and collectives such as Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Collective, Marsha P. Johnson, and the Stonewall Raid resisters, Maxine Waters, Barbara Jordan, Shirley Chisholm and Stacey Abrams, as well as the Black women(+) leaders in our own neighborhoods and families. UBW will examine and take inspiration from the artistic legacy of Ntozake Shange, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison and Urban Bush Women as ways to see our possibilities as artist/ organizers who challenge the status quo.
What place does the sacred feminine have in our organizing, our leadership, and our art making? What is the power of collective action? Within a country that has a dismal history related to its treatment of Black women(+), how have so many powerful Black women(+) leaders rallied and inspired us to action? UBW invites EVERYBODY to join us in this work.
UBW is reclaiming the word EVERYBODY, not as empty diversity, equity & inclusion language, but as an explicit invitation to people of ALL identities who are interested in examining history to strengthen our collective organizing through the lens of the Black Sacred Feminine.
The names UBW states are powerful and our list is an active archive of powerful Black women…Kimberlé Crenshaw and the Say Her Name movement….bell hooks…Audre Lorde…Nikki Giovanni…Maya Angelou…Suzan-Lori Parks…Ava DuVernay….Janelle Monae…Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, adrienne maree brown and Opal Tometi…and and and…
*Women(+): Our thinking around the expansive experiences and embodiments of womanhood are inspired by Queer Art, by The Leeway Foundation, and by other individuals and organizations. Urban Bush Women employs an expansive definition of the word “woman.” With that umbrella term, UBWrefer to self-identified women, gender-nonconforming people, and non-binary people who would use “women(+)” to describe themselves.
ABOUT URBAN BUSH WOMEN
Urban Bush Women (UBW) burst onto the dance scene in 1984, with bold, innovative, demanding and exciting works that bring under-told stories to life through the art and vision of its award-winning founder Jawole Willa Jo Zollar.
