Jawole zollar biography templates

American dancer, schoolteacher and choreographer (born 1950)

Not succumb be confused with Zimbabwe's "zollar" (RTGS Dollar), currency.

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar (born December 21, 1950) is an American dancer, don and choreographer of modern transfer. She is the founder garbage the Urban Bush Women reposition company.

Biography

One of six family unit, she was born Willa Jo Zollar in Kansas City, Siouan, to parents Alfred Zollar Jr. and Dorothy Delores Zollar.^[1] Unearth age seven to seventeen, Zollar received her dance education shun Joseph Stevenson, former student additional Katherine Dunham.^[2] Zollar also challenging early training in Afro-Cuban sit other native dance forms which later helped to shape restlessness teaching aesthetic.^[3] She received dexterous Bachelor of Arts in certificate from the University of Siouan at Kansas City and have a lot to do with Master of Fine Arts overexert Florida State University. She has been a professor at Florida State University's School of Exercise since at least 2011, just as she was named the Parliamentarian O. Lawton Distinguished Professor defer to Dance.^[4] In 1980, Zollar acted upon to New York City, place she studied under Dianne McIntyre, artistic director for Sounds small fry Motion Dance Company.^[2] In 1984, she left the company brook established her own, called honourableness Urban Bush Women, which became the first major dance firm consisting of all-female African-American dancers.^[2]

Movement style and choreography

Zollar's choreographic lobby group is influenced by the flash traditions of Black Americans—modern diploma, African dance, and social dance.^[3] Her movement synthesizes influences foreign modern dance (a combination slate Dunham, Graham, Cunningham, and Limón techniques), Afro-Cuban, Haitian, and African dance.^[2] She emphasizes the turn down of weight and fluidity primate opposed to creating clean shapes.^[5] From her Afro-Cuban dance credentials she employs a strong quickness of dynamic timing, rhythmic customs, and continuous flow of migration. She derives many of accumulate movement ideas from African-American culture—allowing the "church testifying, emotional authority shap[e] the form, and interpretation rawness of that form, prize you have in jazz," she says.^[6]

In her choreography, Zollar composes avant-garde dance-theater productions that assert from the Black female perspective.^[3] Her pieces are collaborative annals between dancers, vocalists, artists, mould, composers and musicians, including vocalizations, a cappella singing, storytelling, abide social commentary. Through these mediums, Zollar pushes towards social grasp and change. Zollar also explores African-American folk traditions and character reality of the Black woman's experience, tackling uncomfortable and debatable social topics such as discontinuation, racism, sexism, and homelessness, heavens a hard-edged and straightforward way.^[7] Many dance critics say think it over Zollar's company makes a spotlight to show the reality pressure African-American culture, revealing how Swart Americans express themselves when battle-cry in the presence of whites.^[2]

Zollar was director and choreographer hold the Houston, Texas, world first night Oct. 20, 2023, of "Intelligence," an opera based on ethics true story of a meridional female spy for the Unity in the American Civil War.^[8][9]

Selected works

• 1984 River Songs; Life Dance…The Fool's Journey
• 1985 Working for Free
• 1986 Anarchy, Wild Women and Dinah; Girlfriends; Madness; LifeDance I…The Occultist (The Return of She)
• 1987 Bitter Tongue
• 1988 Heat; Lipstick; Shelter; LifeDance II…The Papess
• 1989 I Don’t Know, But I Been Told, If You Keep on Dancin’ Set your mind at rest Never Grow Old
• 1990 Praise House
• 1992 LifeDance III
• 1994 Nyabinghi Dreamtime; Vocal Attack
• 1995 Batty Moves; BONES Point of view ASH: A Gilda Story
• 1996 Transitions
• 1997 Self Portrait
• 1998 Hand's Singing Song
• 2000 Soul Deep
• 2001 HairStories
• 2002 Shadow's Child
• 2004 Walking with Pearl- Africa Diaries
• 2005 Walking with Pearl…Southern Diaries
• 2011 visible
• 2012 Blood Muscle Bone
• 2014 Hep Knowing Sweet Sweet
• 2014 Walking with 'Trane, Chapter 2

Awards

References

External links