Jawole Willa Jo Zollar was born in the early 1950s and grew up in Kansas City, Missouri. As a child, she studied modern dance and first performed with Joseph Stevenson, a former student of the pioneering African-American dancer and choreographer, Katherine Dunham. After graduating from high school, she received her BA degree from the University of Missouri and her MFA degree from Florida State University. She moved to New York City in 1980 and began studying with Diane McIntyre, a highly regarded dancer, choreographer, and teacher who was the director of the dance company, Sounds in Motion. Zollar credits much of her early artistic development to McIntyre, particularly in regard to emphasizing the organic relationship between music and dance. In 1984, she set out on her own and founded the Urban Bush Women, a company composed of women of color.

Over the years, Zollar has established a dance technique that synthesizes traditional modern dance, postmodern dance aesthetics, and the dance traditions of the African diaspora, including African American vernacular dance. Her dance works also include her dancers’ vocalizations, as they sing, speak, shout, and generally explore the full potential of the human voice.  She uses this array of performance elements to create commentaries on the lives of black women in America, to confront social injustices, and to trace the rich cultural traditions of the people of the African diaspora. Her dances include Batty Moves (1995), Girlfriends (1986), and Walking With Pearl, which references Pearl Primus’s work.  In addition to her highly-acclaimed performance work, she also engages in artistic and social activism through extended residencies aimed at community empowerment.

Learn more about Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and her work. 

Learn more about Pearl Primus and her work.

Africa Diaries (2004) refers to the trips to Africa that Primus took, beginning in 1948, to conduct the anthropological research.

Southern Diaries (2005) refers to the trip which Primus made during the summer of 1944 to live and work with poor migrant workers in the rural South. In Southern Diaries, Zollar incorporates reconstructions of Strange Fruit and Hard Time Blues with her own choreography, creating a theatrical continuum between two generations of modern dance artists.

Classroom Activities

Read: Read John Perpener’s article on Jawole Willa Jo Zollar.

Expand: How does the search for identity—as well as social and political protest—continue to be a concern among artists today?

Watch: View Zollar’s Walking with Pearl. Remind students that in observing dance, they should be looking for ways the choreographer creates meaning through gestures, images, and connections to literature, other dances, and every day life. Use the Movement Analysis Worksheet.

Write: Allow students to free-write (3 minutes) their responses to the dance, especially writing descriptions of the dance. Afterward, ask writers to harvest verbs from their responses. Read the verbs aloud as a list. Ask students to use these verbs to write a poem or descriptive paragraph about Walking With Pearl. Ask students to share their writings in small groups.

Discuss:

• Identify differences and similarities among the works by Martha Graham, Pearl Primus, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar.
• Zollar’s work makes deliberate use of Primus’s words and dances. Discuss the impact of this borrowing. Think of additional artists who refer to other artists’ works in making new work.
• How have conditions facing African-American women changed from Primus’s time to Zollar’s time? What are some of the things that have remained the same?

Move: Research a dance form practiced by members of their family and/or community and learn steps from the dance. This material will become the basis for creating your own dance.

Classroom Activities

Watch: View Strange Fruit and Hard Time Blues. Ask students to observe with the following in mind: What movement elements do you see in the dances: spatial patterns (for example, straight line, circular, rectangular, lines at right angles), body shapes, and different movement qualities, i.e. light/strong, fast/slow, direct/indirect? How does Primus express themes of social commentary and protest in her work? What gestures does she use?  How do the movement elements support the meanings of these dances?

Discuss: What do Primus’s dances tell us about 1940s America?  Comment on the irony of Americans fighting to liberate Europeans during World War II, while racism continued in America.

Compare: Can you isolate and describe the differences between Primus’s and Graham’s dance expressions of social commentary and protest themes?

Move: Set up a movement experience that allows students to explore gestures and movement qualities present in Primus’s work and that students might relate to contemporary protest. This might be done through a technique class, improvisation, or dance making experience.

Read: Read the information on Pearl Primus from Margaret Lloyd’s chapter “New Leaders—New Directions” from The Borzoi Book of Modern Dance. Do some research on America in the 1940s and list some events important to African Americans in the 1940s.

Expand: Can you think of examples of social commentary and protest as reflected in popular culture today? Bring in examples of contemporary artists who use details from their lives—their experiences, their travels, their personal relationships—as inspiration for the creation of their music, visual art, literature and poetry, or dance.

Connect: You might also create a project that asks students to interview senior members of their community and collect oral histories of the Great Depression.

Research: Find American literature that reflects themes of social and political protest. Poetry is a good choice to focus on since that is the literary form Primus drew upon to inspire several of her dances.

Like Langston Hughes’s poem, Pearl Primus’s The Negro Speaks of Rivers is a meditation on the African diaspora. Primus’s dance evokes a sense of connection, pride, and strength among peoples of African descent. Students will identify the movements and gestures that help capture the choreographer’s ideas.

Classroom Activities

Discuss: Ask students for their impressions about Primus’s life in New York in the 1930 and 1940s. Primus was both from Trinidad and identified as an African American. How would her experience be different than Graham’s?

Watch: View Primus’s 1944 solo, The Negro Speaks of Rivers. Write down initial impressions of the dance and answer the following: What kinds of movements did Primus use in order to capture the images in Hughes’s poem? What kinds of movements did Primus use to create her vision of an American identity? Watch The Negro Speaks of Rivers again using the Movement Analysis Worksheet. Look to identify spatial patterns (for example: straight line, circular, rectangular, lines at right angles), body shapes, and different movement qualities, i.e. light/strong, fast/slow, direct/indirect.

Discuss: 

• Compare and contrast the two ways of observing dance—looking for movement in relationship to meaning and looking for compositional movement elements (floor patterns, shapes, etc).  How do these ways of seeing differ and lead you to different aspects of dance?  How are they complementary?
• Describe some of the images you found incorporating words from the Movement Analysis exercise.
• How is this dance like and different from Frontier?
• What are some of the dance movements and everyday gestures that we associate with African American identity today?
• What are some of the ways that a single ethnic group’s movement patterns become a part of the lives of all Americans?

Write: After reading the chapter on Pearl Primus from John O. Perpener’s African-American Concert Dance: The Harlem Renaissance and Beyond, Langston Hughes’s poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” and Pearl Primus’s “My Statement,” write down ideas about what life might have been like for Primus growing up in the United States in the 1930s. If you need to, do a little research about America in the 1930s, especially the Harlem Renaissance.

Expand: Research the Great Depression. Be sure to look at photographs taken during this period, for example images by photographers Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. How would you describe the people in these photographs?