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In Studio 1 of the Center for Art and Dance, a group of dancers are hard at work— not dancing, but scribbling in notebooks. Facilitators from the Urban Bush Women (UBW) dance company have given them a writing prompt and five minutes to reflect and journal. After writing, the students pick random phrases from their entries, and use them as inspiration for an eight-count phrase, turning their memories into movement, and combining them with their classmates’ choreography to form a dance that illustrates where they are from. 

This exercise kicked off the first session of the Collab Lab, one of several workshops that the UBW dance company led during their weeklong residency at St. Olaf College. Between February 16-20, UBW facilitated several events that challenged students and faculty to create movements reflecting their emotions, experiences, and environments, while creating welcoming spaces for participants to experiment, meditate, and have fun dancing together. 

UBW is a highly-acclaimed theater dance company from New York City that centers the perspectives of Black women through African diasporic dance. Founded in 1984 by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, the company focuses on elevating underrepresented voices and stories, and using dance as a vehicle to address social issues and advocate for change. Their Builders, Organizers, and Leaders through Dance (BOLD) workshops travel around the country to share their styles and educate others about the power of dance. 

The BOLD facilitators for the St. Olaf residency were Courtney J. Cook, former associate artistic director at UBW, and Jaimé Yawa Dzandu, the learning and community manager for the BOLD network. While the company has always focused on contemporary dance theater and the African diaspora, its unique style is constantly evolving as new members and ideas join the company. 

“If you follow the timeline of UBW, there will be a grounding aesthetic, but there will also be some nuanced differences, because it’s informed by the culture, movement, and experiences of who is in the company at the time,” Cook explains. 

UBW prides itself on the example it sets for dance as a healing and changemaking practice, designing its choreography around social issues and cultural movements. 

“Dance can be used to tell a story, a practice that can be healing,” Dzandu elaborates. “Dance allows our body to release our stress, clear our mind, and give voice to what we’re seeing. Dance is celebratory, and is also a form of resistance.” 

This is not UBW’s first time at St. Olaf. The company held a two-week residency during February 2012, with facilitators Maria Bauman and Marjani Forte-Saunders leading workshops, teaching classes, and setting a piece for St. Olaf’s Spring Company Dance Concert. The Dance Department has been eager to welcome them back to campus ever since. 

“Urban Bush Women is well-known, and so foundational to U.S. concert dance,” Brianna Johnson, assistant professor of dance at St. Olaf, says. Johnson worked on coordinating this residency for over a year and was very glad to see it come to life. “Urban Bush Women’s work is really about getting to know the community that they are coming into, and supporting the things that emerge from within. I wanted our community to get to be a part of that process, and also have the students think about what they get through this process, and what their art does in the world beyond this.”

During their residency, Cook and Dzandu gave a class lecture and led four different workshops. Two workshops—“Technique and Process” and the “Collab Lab”— were curated for dance majors, while the other two—”Dance for Every Body” and “Mindful Bodies and Reflective Practices”—were open to anyone on campus. Although these workshops focused on different skill levels and elements of dance, they shared a common theme of community, mindfulness, connection, and creativity. For each event, Cook and Dzandu began by getting to know everyone in the space, asking names, pronouns, and dance-related ice-breaker questions. They set the tone for every event with grounding, full-body warmups that helped participants consider the space they occupied, and the people they shared it with. 

For the first workshop, “Technique and Process”, students from the Modern Dance II and III classes explored the fundamentals of UBW’s dance style, and learned part of the choreography from their 1988 production, Shelter. The students warmed up by walking around the studio, taking time to notice the environment they were dancing in, and how they felt in it. For the main portion of the class, students participated in a dance relay, lining up and learning movement from the facilitators, adding to the dance pattern each time they crossed the room. The pattern grew from a simple walk across the floor to an elaborate phrase of jumps and turns. By the end of the class, students were cheering on their classmates, laughing off their mistakes, and owning their space. Margaret Black ‘28 described the class as “full of joy, acceptance, and appreciation for the way our bodies move through a space and how we can connect with our peers.” 

Several students from the modern dance workshop also participated in the “Collab Lab”, a daily workshop for dance majors to explore their own style and create a performance for the Ecotones Dance Showcase. Throughout the week, the students participated in various exercises and conversations to connect with each other, talk about their beliefs and values, and establish ideas for the message that they wanted to send in their performance. Students practiced embodying their ideas through dance, and sharing them with the class to develop a larger narrative. The resulting performance blended UBW and student choreography to create a deeply moving piece about care, support, identity, and community that received enthusiastic praise at the showcase on March 5-7.

UBW’s residency also gave students and faculty the opportunity to dance purely for pleasure at their “Dance for Every Body” and “Mindful Bodies and Reflective Practices” workshops. During “Dance for Every Body”, a small group of students and dance faculty met in The Pause Mane Stage for an all-levels dance session that focused on mindfulness and awareness. Dzandu began the event with some deep breathing and affirmations. She also gave the group a few minutes to groove to the music before teaching a social line dance called “Boots on the Ground.” 

For Ariel Edwards ‘26, this event was a valuable opportunity to connect with others. 

“I got to dance with people I don’t normally dance with,” she says. “It was nice to see my professors there and to meet new Oles.”

The “Mindful Bodies and Reflective Practices” workshop also focused on awareness, particularly how it relates to self-care. Participants started with a walk around the studio, taking deep breaths and shaking out tension. They then moved on to experimenting with movement from different prompts, modifying their moves as they embodied earth, fire, wind, and water. For the final part of the workshop, participants divided into groups and created phrases that visualized their different methods of self-care, inventing choreography about nature walks, healthy sleep, meditation, and even hobbies like knitting. 

For Emily Mohl, assistant professor of biology and education at St. Olaf, this workshop was a way of seeing the unifying power of dance. 

“I noticed that we all responded to each other when we were moving in a shared space; our movements were often similar or patterned off each other.”  

Throughout the workshop, Dzandu and Cook took time to have discussions, asking participants what they noticed about themselves and others, and what thoughts, emotions, and memories arose while they danced. 

“This dialogic process is a deep part of UBW,” explains Cook. “We have conversations by unpacking and synthesizing information, and embodying what comes up.” 

Creating an environment that acknowledges and celebrates each individual’s story and values is a key part of Cook and Dzandu’s process. Before they start an event or workshop, they spend some time researching the area, getting to know the history, the landscape, and the people, and listen actively to the stories and sounds that they come across. Dzandu explained this process further: 

“As Urban Bush Women, we value when we enter communities not of our own,” Dzandu explains. “We research, we listen to the space, to the land, to the people, to the environment we’re in. Our ears are open, our eyes are open, and we’re very curious.” 

Dzandu and Cook’s main goal is to listen to the students they teach, and show them how to listen to each other. 

“We’re excited to see what stories that the students want to share—with us and with each other—so that when we leave, they’ve built a deeper relationship with one another and will continue to collaborate with one another,” Dzandu elaborates. 

The atmosphere that UBW created at St. Olaf was unique from other workshops that dance students have experienced before. 

“With UBW, I felt included, wanted, and like an asset,” says Sam Suro ‘28. “Regardless of our skill or where we came from, they genuinely seemed interested in our stories, and helping us progress not just as a dancer but as a peer in society, something I cannot say about other conventions I have attended.”

Overall, event participants felt more comfortable while dancing, and less afraid to experiment and try new things. 

“Typically, I’m reserved when I am dancing,” Zevon Johnson ‘28 says. “But at this event, I opened up and cheered for people, something I wouldn’t normally do.” 

Several participants also mentioned how the workshops gave them a greater connection to their classmates and the wider campus community. 

“Although we were in a class, it felt like we were still a community,” Johnson adds. “There wasn’t a sense of ‘teacher’ and ‘student’. Rather, we were all dancers dancing in a space together.”

Throughout their time on the Hill, Cook and Dzandu emphasized the value of dance in connection, wellness, changemaking, and healing. Even for non-dancers, dance is an important way to get in touch with yourself and your community. 

“You can’t have dance without relationship,” says Cook. “Our lives are movement and relationship-based, and dance shows us how to live and move in our bodies.” 

After a week of workshops, conversations, and movement, many campus members walked away with a deeper understanding of how dance can build connection, reflection, and community — just as Dzandu wished. 

“My hope is that dance can create a space for people to be brave, cultivate safety, and tell their stories.”

Through UBW, St. Olaf students have gained new perspectives and confidence in their relationships with dance. By learning how to create art as a community while making space for their own stories, they are learning that dance isn’t just an activity: it’s a model for how to live.