Bushified

Sometimes you fall in love with a client.  There is a sweet spot where your own heart’s purpose is fully aligned with what your client is trying to do in the world.  In that sweet spot they are no longer really a client – you become true partners.

I’ve just wrapped up the contracted part of our work with Urban Bush Women, but I’m certain that ours is a partnership that will continue.

 Rooted deeply in the stories of women and the African diaspora, Urban Bush Women offers dance as an expression of beauty and a catalyst for social justice.  Courageous, bold and inspired, we work across race and gender to reclaim wholeness within individuals and communities.  We are new artists for a new society.

What UBW brings is exactly what we need.  Our quest for social transformation must be rooted – bound up with – the actual experience of those who have been excluded.  It must be a creative expression.  And it must be an expression of beauty.

Our work must become embodied – if it is ever to be called movement.  The work of transformation is as somatic as it is spiritual, it is social – it is relational – and therefore it is political.

It has been an honor to work with people who come at justice from the perspective of the artist.  It has been inspiring to work with artists who will not be relegated to a corner called “the arts.”  Artists who understand that art is the work of community and that we can’t have justice, if we don’t have art.

During our closing circle I called upon tantric cosmology and the idea that nothing ever happened in that perfect place of empty stillness that some call the ground of being.  All of manifestation, all action – evolution itself, the divine thrust of becoming, it all depends on the goddess as she does her sacred dance.  Some worship her as “the bliss of the eternal play of consciousness.”

That is precisely what this work was at its most authentic moments – it felt like an act of worship at the edge of a movement’s evolution.

Yes – I’ve been Bushified!