The first words I heard Jawole Zollar say – before we were even introduced – as she watched some Brooklyn high school students filing into the auditorium at Lincoln Center, were “You can always tell a school that's based on obedience and control versus a school that is based on thinking and learning.” And I thought, I want to work with this woman. This spoke also about learning dance not only as an execution of choreography, but a critical communication in which you know your audience. What will the language of dance do to educate and challenge these young people as critical thinkers? How will it contribute to social change? What potential will these students draw from this or any performance to inspire their own creative pursuits and discipline? This is a lot to embed in a half-hour performance. But it's a step, maybe, the beginning of a conversation that rarely happens in schools, a conversation between students and artists – not artists who fail to recognize their own privilege, but artists who have emerged from, in many cases, the same struggles these students face, struggles of race, income, and education, but also struggles against those who would demean their artistic aspirations, indeed even their right to have arts in the schools let alone artistic aspirations.

Urban Bush Women (UBW) may be best known for communicating through the language of dance, and for this work alone they may be exemplary. But more significantly for Artography, they have been and are developing a new language of activism, a new synthesis of art and activism that may be not only exemplary, but may be unique. The words for this new language may not exist yet, indeed what a dance company can teach us is that the language of activism and social justice must be, in part, non-verbal. It is the potential to develop and capture this language that is so terribly exciting and that I think would contribute so irreplaceably to Artography.

The school performance we witnessed at the site visit was a dialogue through dance. The ensemble performed four excerpted short pieces from their repertoire, with a kind of encore piece added on, a rap in fact rather than a dance. These students were unruly, loud, and in fact disrespectful to the performers. The first dance from “Give Your Hands to the Struggle” (1998) actually elicited embarrassed laughter at some of the more erotic gestures and stances. It was a challenging curtain-raiser and many of the students were not ready for the challenge. The second piece, “Girlfriends” (1986) engaged them as a narrative in mime; the students could relate to the body language, the story, and the emotions of conflict, ostracism, and reconciliation. The peak was “Sunset,” from “Walking with Pearl: African Diaries” (2004) which rendered them speechless. Any observer in the audience would notice the way their chatter and laughter were sucked out of the room; they were compelled. Finally, “Cool Baby Cool/Batty Moves Rap” from 2008 engaged them in a more contemporary language of movement and talk, which primed them for the talkback afterwards. One of the ensemble members even talked about the lack of respect she could feel from the stage, others spoke to artistic possibility, and the necessity of pursuing creative work and expression with discipline and training. (Jawole said they typically do more talking and interpretation than the folks at Lincoln Center would allow.) There was not a moment of patronizing – the arts are everyone's birthright. These were not outsiders from privileged backgrounds coming to lecture at or civilize the masses through art but artists who had gone through those very struggles themselves to live as full-time working artists.

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