Jawole Willa Jo Zollar in conversation with Ananya Chatterjea October 21, 2010

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar is the award-winning founder and artistic director of the acclaimed Urban Bush Women. Unflinching, provocative, and truth-telling, Zollar is celebrating her 25th anniversary as one of the most important artists and social agents of our generation. Jawole will discuss her project Zollar: Uncensored, an retrospective and evocative journey of Jawole's creative history from 1984 to the present that speak to her early investigations into eroticism, sensuality and the reclaiming of the broken parts of the self after trauma. She will also examine and pay tribute to two important choreographers that have shaped her work: Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus.

Ananya Chatterjea is a professor of Dance at the University of Minnesota and choreographer, founder, and artistic director of Ananya Dance Theatre, a company of women artists of color, diverse in age, race, nationality, and sexual orientation, but uniformly committed to artistic excellence and passionate articulation of dreams, hopes, and desires. She is also an organizer of the IAS Performance and Social justice Collaborative which conducts research on environmental racism and the trauma and resistance of communities of women of color across global North and South.

Presented as part of the U of M Dance Program Symposium “Continuously Rich: Black Women and Cultural Production Thu, Oct 21 – Sat, Oct 23. dance.umn.edu, and in partnership with U of M Women’s Studies and KFAI, Fresh Air Radio 90.3FM, and the Center for Afro and African American Studies.

Official Website: http://www.ias.umn.edu/thursdayscalf10.php