SCAT!

“I grew up performing in floor shows in Black neighborhoods in a segregated Kansas City in the 1950s & 60s. My mother was a dancer and a jazz singer, and my father sold real estate and ran a bar called Al and Bud’s. During this era, Black businesses were booming, and there was great hope for upward mobility after World War II.

SCAT! is modeled after the structure and content of the great tradition of the Black floor show, which included comic MCs (like Moms Mabley and Pigmeat Markham), flash acts (think the Nicholas Brothers or the Crackerjacks), eccentric dancers (like Earl “Snakehips” Tucker), storytelling orators, kiddie acts, striptease/exotic dancers (à la Josephine Baker or Sahji), and the Shim Sham Shimmy—a traditional tap dance finale.”

—Jawole Willa Jo Zollar

“Jawole Willa Jo Zollar has had a consistent and innovative interest in mining tradition and creating new ritual.”—The New York Times

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar began a relationship with the Fisher Center in 2020, working with director Daniel Fish on the 2020 production Most Happy in Concert. Growing up in Kansas City, Missouri, she earned her B.A. in dance from the University of Missouri at Kansas City and her M.F.A. in dance from Florida State University. In 1980, Jawole moved to New York City to study with Dianne McIntyre at Sounds in Motion. In 1984, Jawole founded Urban Bush Women (UBW) as a performance ensemble dedicated to exploring the use of cultural expression as a catalyst for social change.

In addition to creating over 34 works for Urban Bush Women, Zollar has created works for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Philadanco, and many universities across the United States. Her collaborations include Compagnie Jant-Bi from Senegal and Nora Chipaumire. She was the choreographer of Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of American Popular Music. In 2023, Zollar was commissioned by Houston Grand Opera to direct and choreograph a new Jake Heggie opera, Intelligence.

Urban Bush Women has toured five continents and was selected as one of three U.S. dance companies to inaugurate a cultural diplomacy program for the U.S. Department of State in 2010. Zollar serves as director of the UBW Summer Leadership Institute, founding and visioning partner of Urban Bush Women, and as the Nancy Smith Fichter Professor of Dance and Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor at Florida State University. Zollar has been a United States Artists Wynn fellow and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial fellow. She holds honorary degrees from Columbia College Chicago, Tufts University, Rutgers University, and Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA.

Zollar has received the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, the Dance Magazine Award, the Dance/USA Honor Award, the “Bessie” Lifetime Achievement in Dance Award for her work in the field, the Dance Teacher Award of Distinction, and the Martha Hill Dance Fund Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2020, The Ford Foundation declared Urban Bush Women one of America’s Cultural Treasures. Zollar has recently been awarded a 2021 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellow, the 2022 APAP Honors Award of Merit for Achievement in the Performing Arts and the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize.

Recently, Zollar has been named the recipient of the American Dance Festival 2024 Samuel H. Scripps/American Dance Festival Award for lifetime achievement.

Craig Harris exploded onto the jazz scene in 1976, bringing the entire history of the jazz trombone with him. Craig handled the total vernacular the way a skilled orator utilizes the spoken word. He has performed with a veritable Who’s Who of progressive jazz’s most important figures, and his own projects display both a unique sense of concept and a total command of the sweeping expanse of musical expression. Those two qualities have dominated Craig’s forty years of activity, bringing him beyond the confines of the jazz world into multimedia and performance art as a composer, performer, conceptualist, music curator, and artistic director.

Craig, who comes from a tradition of art as cultural facilitation to help promote change, has employed his musical voice to comment on social injustice with projects including God’s Trombones, based on James Weldon Johnson’s book of sermons; Souls Within the Veil commemorating the centennial of W.E.B. DuBois’s seminal work; TriHarlenium, a sound portrait and 30-year musical time capsule of Harlem; and Brown Butterfly, a tribute to the exquisite movements of Muhammad Ali.

Urban Bush Women (UBW) burst onto the dance scene in 1984 with bold, innovative, demanding, and exciting works that brought under-told stories to life under the artistic direction of Co-Artistic Directors of the UBW Company, Chanon Judson and Mame Diarra Speis. Originally founded by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, the company continues to weave contemporary dance, music, and text with the history, culture, and spiritual traditions of the African Diaspora.

With the ground-breaking performance ensemble at its core and ongoing programs, including the Summer Leadership Institute (SLI), BOLD (Builders, Organizers & Leaders through Dance), and the Choreographic Center Initiative, UBW affects the overall ecology of the arts by promoting artistic legacies; projecting the voices of the under-heard and people of color; bringing attention to and addressing issues of equity in the dance field and throughout the United States; and by providing platforms and serving as a conduit for culturally and socially relevant experimental art makers.

UBW galvanizes artists, activists, audiences, and communities through performances, artist development, education, and community engagement.

Urban Bush Women 40th-anniversary leadership funding provided by Bloomberg Philanthropies. Additional funding is provided by the Howard Gilman Foundation.

Lead commissioning support for the development and creation of SCAT! is provided by the Fisher Center at Bard and Brown Arts Institute at Brown University. Additional commissioning support is generously provided by: The Perelman Performing Arts Center, The O’Donnell-Green Music and Dance Foundation, and American Dance Festival with support from the Doris Duke/SHS Foundations Award for New Works.

SCAT! is made possible in part by The Acton Family Fund, MAP Fund (supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Mellon Foundation), National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.