The 92nd Street Y, New York’s 2024/25 Harkness Dance Center season continues with Urban Bush Women, the critically acclaimed and award-winning company now celebrating their 40th anniversary. For their program – entitled Solo Meditations – co-artistic directors Chanon Judson and Mame Diarra Speis have curated two unique evenings featuring solos, duets, and a quartet with special guest collaborators, along with video created by Nick Hussoung and animation by Ausar Judson. Select works will include live music from exceptional guest artists like Grace Galu Kalambay, Lucianna Padmore, Manchild Black, Jerome Jennings, and more. Performances are in 92NY’s Buttenwieser Hall at the Arnhold Center on December 6 and 7 at 7 pm. Tickets from $40 / $15 students at https://www.92ny.org/event/ubw-x-92ny.

“Triple-threat performers who dance, sing and act with a sometimes searing sense of truthfulness.” — The New York Times

About Urban Bush Women Urban Bush Women is a groundbreaking Black women-led theatrical dance company and social activism ensemble, founded in 1984 by visionary choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zollar as an engine and an amplifier for the unheard stories of Black Women+. Today, under the artistic leadership of Chanon 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, front and center stage. Similarly, 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 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.

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