Urban Bush Women Launches The Music Center's 2024–2025 Dance Season at Mark Taper Forum

 The Music Center will make history when it kicks off its 2024–2025 dance season of Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance at The Music Center on November 22–24, 2024, with a first-ever dance presentation in the performing arts center’s beloved Mark Taper Forum. The storied Brooklyn-based dance company Urban Bush Women (UBW) has the honor of becoming the first-ever professional dance theatre company in The Music Center’s momentous 60 years to perform at the 739-seat theatre. Adding to the excitement, UBW will be making its Music Center debut with the West Coast premiere of SCAT!... The Complex Lives of Al & Dot, Dot & Al Zollar, a love story set in a fictional jazz club where two people make their journey to Kansas City as part of the Great Migration. SCAT! is presented in association with Center Theatre Group.

“What an incredible time Angelenos are having at The Music Center as we celebrate our 60th year and open the doors of the landmark Mark Taper Forum for Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance at The Music Center for the first time,” said Rachel S. Moore, president and CEO of The Music Center. “To watch a dance performance inside the intimate Mark Taper Forum will be a new experience for audiences; it’s the perfect venue for UBW to perform SCAT!, a gripping story that will resonate deeply with those of us who have ever chased their dreams boundlessly and fearlessly.”

SCAT! is conceived, directed and co-choreographed by UBW founder Jawole Willa Jo Zollar—as her final work for the company. Growing up in the mid-20th century performing in Black neighborhoods in a segregated Kansas City, Zollar tells a powerful tale of the aftermath of the Great Migration in the 1940s and 50s when aspirations are impacted by the harsh realities of American life. According to UBW, SCAT! is a poetic performance orature in the style of African American Toasts (the couplet form of rhyming, which boast and toast the epic hero or heroine) and was influenced by novelist Chinua Achebe who combined the concept of the orality of African storytelling with literature. The electrifying 90-minute dance work is set to an original jazz score by Craig Harris and performed by live musicians.

“SCAT! is a post vaudeville revue of jazz improvisation to make memory, felt in the present while calling upon the past and imagining a future,” said Zollar. “SCAT! is my ritual remembrance of my family migration through time and space from the Great Migration to the complex lives of Al & Dot Zollar in Kansas City. Part truth, part memory, part rumor, part myth… the journey begins again and again.”
Zollar founded Urban Bush Women in 1984 as an engine and an amplifier for the unheard stories of Black women+. Today, under the artistic leadership of Channon Judson and Mame Diarra Speis, UBW combines revolutionary performance, deep-healing community engagement and ancestral knowledge from the African diaspora into a cultural force that is urgent, forward-looking and essential. For the last four decades, UBW has defied expectations and easy categorization with its bold, narrative storytelling. The very bodies of the seven founding members of UBW—Black women of various shapes and sizes—challenged and changed the landscape of who could be seen on stage as a dancer. The subject matter of the work placed the stories of such women, historically overlooked and undervalued in America, up front and center stage.

UBW remains committed to ensuring that underserved audiences, especially people of color who face systemic barriers to accessing conventional performance, are engaged, invited and made welcome wherever the company tours. UBW also embraces the power of radical storytelling to activate social change. Whether creating genre-defying work for the stage, guiding the development of Black women choreographers and producers, organizing for justice through art making or inspiring leaders across generations, UBW is an innovator, operating at the vanguard.

Tickets to Urban Bush Women are available for purchase now by visiting musiccenter.org/UBW or by calling (213) 972-0711.

Season subscriptions are available for purchase now by visiting musiccenter.org or by calling (213) 972-0711. As part of these residencies, The Music Center will offer arts and cultural experiences, such as panel discussions, master classes, student matinees, special events and more, all of which are free to the public.

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