Dance : Choreography Lacks in Gutsy Urban Bush Women Program

In the nine years since she formed Urban Bush Women, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar has honed the group’s skills until acting, singing, dancing have grown equally gutsy, equally commanding. A three-part program at the Wadsworth Theater on Friday highlighted this phenomenal versatility--without easing doubts that Zollar’s choreography has lagged behind.

The program’s riskiest achievement, “LifeDance III: The Empress (Womb Wars)” avoided dance altogether except for a few seconds of African movement midway through and some agonized flailing by the naked Valerie Winborne. Instead, it concentrated on Zollar’s text--delivered by her in a number of voices--and its theme of unwanted pregnancies, unwanted daughters, unwanted women.

“I go down to the river to cleanse myself,” she began, crouched on a tabletop, speaking in a hoarse ghostly tone. Developing a link between abuse of women and destruction of the environment, Zollar wove ancestral myth, personal testimony, gesture, chant, song and processional movement into a powerful plea of embattled womanhood: “No more rape . . . no more oppression.”

The confessional integrity of this Jungian 1992 theater piece stood in contrast to the relentless audience-courting cuteness of “I Don’t Know but I Been Told If You Keep on Dancin’ You’ll Never Grow Old.” A stylized compilation of contemporary schoolyard activities (barefoot stepping routines, jump-rope without a rope, call-and-response rap, etc.), this 1989 showpiece cultivated a footloose style but in fact depended on hard-sell athleticism.

As always, the dancers’ energy proved amazing--never more so than in the virtuosic solo that Maia Claire Garrison performed to drum accompaniment. But even the boldest physicality and the broadest character humor couldn’t utterly disguise a lack of choreographic shape and perspective.

These problems loomed larger in the more subdued “Nyabinghi Dreamtime,” described in press materials as a work in progress but not identified as such in the program booklet. A depiction in quasi-folkloric style of Rastafarian traditions in rural Jamaica, the piece found Zollar incorporating movement artifacts from several cultures--with, for example, undulating torso and pointed-toe extensions combined none too persuasively in a solo for Terri Cousar.

Worse, Zollar’s group dances often featured constant, radical shifts of pattern and impetus, exactly like those touring ethnic-vaudeville ensembles that enforce variety at any cost.

Nevertheless, “Nyabinghi Dreamtime” soared as folk opera, fusing a spectacular percussion score by Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn with rich vocals (often led by Winborne) incorporating traditional island songs. Change the music and the whole work would be different; change the dances, and who’d even notice?