DANCE : Dancing Spirits : Urban Bush Women probes the darkest and most joyful corners of the contemporary African-American psyche in its ‘Praise House’

Young Hannah, who sees visions of angels, sits curled at her Grannie’s feet. Her mother sweeps nearby, complaining that she can’t get the young girl to do the dishes.

Slowly the lights change, and, as Hannah’s mother fades into the darkness, a line of women in luscious orange-and-red, African-tinged tribal dress undulate onto the stage.

The generational conflict is both ancient and recent, domestic and mystic. Hannah, like so many other visionaries, is caught between the worldly and otherworldly obligations that pull such people in opposite directions.

Yet it might just as well be the story of Hannah’s creator, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar. A dance-world maverick and the artistic director of Urban Bush Women, she’s long been dedicated as much to her cultural inheritance as to contemporary techniques.

The dance-theater of Urban Bush Women has been hailed as spiritual, political and avant-garde--as a black feminist statement and an experimental fusing of modern and traditional African dance. Actually, the 7-year-old New York-based company, which presents its “Praise House” on Friday and Saturday at UCLA’s Wadsworth Theater, is all these things and more.

With dance, narrative and imagistic texts, live music and a cappella singing that resembles chants, Urban Bush Women’s stage collages probe the darkest and most joyful corners of the contemporary African-American psyche.

“I’m researching the ways in which African-Americans and Native Americans have been under siege and the ways we’ve struggled against it,” Zollar says of how “Praise House” fits in with the company’s repertoire. “The interest in African-American culture and the spiritual tradition has been ongoing, and this is a continuation.”

This, however, is just the kind of statement that rankles the foes of multiculturalism, the movement that is giving greater prominence to such companies as Zollar’s. Critic-director Robert Brustein, for example, has tried to keep work based in non-European cultures in its place, by inveighing in the New Republic and elsewhere against what he sees as “a strict racial and ethnic orthodoxy” and “racial fundamentalism.”

Yet while the work revels in what W. E. B. Dubois famously called “the souls of black folk,” this dance-theater is anything but culturally exclusive. By confronting the demons of her own heritage, Zollar also probes the sorest points of contemporary American alienation. As the New York Times’ Jennifer Dunning put it, “Jawole Willa Jo Zollar has become the anthropologist of dance. Her exploration of cultures . . . (provides) treatises that have the ring of powerful, luminous truth.”

In “Praise House,” which premiered at the Spoleto Festival U.S.A. in 1990, the problems Zollar takes on are among the most fundamental facing the African-American community and the country at large.

“It’s about spiritual understanding and awakening,” she says of the multimedia work, which uses the story of an African-American woman in the rural South to explore the pains and joys of visionary artists. “We’re in a time when there’s a breakdown of community support.

“The places people have gone--like the church--are not able to serve people anymore. It’s due to the corruption inside or because they’re not dealing with where people are--either emotionally or spiritually.”

That, in turn, fosters and abets more tangible problems. “Gangs fulfill a community and spiritual bonding and need--they are familial,” Zollar says. “They couldn’t exist if there wasn’t a place for them.”

While Zollar’s creations are often seen as overtly topical--broaching subjects as current as homelessness and reproductive rights--she typically spends four to five years researching before beginning a major work. For “Praise House”--which does not take on any particular item out of the headlines--she spent countless hours gathering information about people who have revelatory experiences and prophetic dreams.

Of all the visionaries she unearthed, though, it was a North Carolina painter and writer named Minnie Evans who was the most profound inspiration. Her words and visual images helped shape Hannah, the central character in “Praise House.”

Hannah, whom we see played by various performers at different stages of her life, has some base in Zollar’s own childhood. She was the daughter of a cabaret singer and grew up in Kansas City, Mo., where she started dancing at age 5 and soon thereafter was onstage as the kiddie act in a nightclub revue.

She discovered modern dance in college and in graduate school at the University of Florida and struggled for years to reconcile the discipline with her passion for African-American forms.

Today, the dance world not only accepts the kind of admixture it long resisted, but it embraces it. Urban Bush Women fills houses on the coasts as easily as it does in the heartland. Still, Zollar believes that the presenting scene has a way to go toward a true multiculturalism, with a fair distribution of access for artists and audiences.

“Places are trying to change,” she says of venues across the country. “Some are saying that what they have been doing is not responsive, and some are changing out of a missionary sense.”

Mainly, though, Zollar doesn’t think change comes out of the goodness of institutions’ hearts. “Some are changing because they’re scared that they’re losing their subscriber base because it’s getting older,” she says. “All of it has to do with the pressure by artists and audiences for change.

“There’s more pressure to present and recognize (non-European based work),” she says. “The struggle is to have the work presented in a variety of venues, in the main halls and in the alternative spaces and the spaces within communities.

“Change comes from pressure from the artists of color and other artists in sympathy with that--gay and lesbian and all the forces that have been disenfranchised from the mainstream--not from people becoming aware,” Zollar says.

She is equally “cynical,” though, about the ongoing problems facing women in society at large. “Sexual harassment is not a female issue,” she says, referring to the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill square-off. “Women are the primary victims, but it’s both of our problems. There are male and female victims of rape.”

The root cause is our propensity to compartmentalize social problems and to pass them off as “special-interest” concerns, she says.

“That’s why AIDS was able to grow, because it was separated out,” Zollar says. “They were able to say, ‘That’s their problem.’ ”

In keeping with the themes of struggle in her exuberant choreography, Zollar refuses an easy optimism.

“I don’t think much has changed,” she says. “There are more privileges for some segments of the population to enjoy. But for the majority of African-American and Latino women, there’s not much of a change.

“Lynching has become more sophisticated, so it exists in other forms.”

Since she began “Praise House” in 1989-90--commissioned by a consortium of presenters including Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Spoleto Festival U.S.A., the Walker Art Center, the American Music Theater Festival and others--Zollar has also undertaken other projects.

She has written a solo work in progress called “LifeDance III . . . the Empress (Womb Wars)” that deals with reproductive rights and was performed this summer at the Colorado Dance Festival.

The company, which has kept up a rigorous national and international touring schedule for years, will also be branching out into new artistic situations soon. In January, it will begin a three-month residency in New Orleans, sponsored by the Contemporary Arts Center there.

That long a residency is something new for Urban Bush Women. It also typifies the ways in which Zollar is continually searching to bring her onstage concern with community back out to the audience.

“The residency is (part of our interest in) long-term community engagement projects and grass-roots work,” says Zollar, whose work nearly always portrays the power and faith to be found in women--and the society at large--bonding together. “It’s a way to be in the community.”