Photo by Woosler Delisfort

(NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ) -- Mason Gross Dance presents Urban Bush Women (UBW) on Wednesday, March 12, 2025 in the Elizabeth Ross Johnson Theater inside the New Brunswick Performing Arts Center (NBPAC). Founded in 1984 by choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, UBW is a Brooklyn-based performance ensemble and dance company. Showtime is 7:30pm.

Now under the artistic direction of Chanon Judson and Mame Diarra Speis, UBW seeks to bring the untold and under-told histories and stories to light through dance. They do this from a woman-centered perspective and as members of the African Diaspora community in order to create a more equitable balance of power in the dance world and beyond.

The performance will include Blues Medicine, Hard Time Blues, Blues Melody, Walking with 'Trane Quartet (excerpt), and Shelter and will feature live music performed by Grace Galu Kalambay and Lucianna Padmore.

Tickets for the general public are $25 and available for purchase online.  Discounted tickets are available for Rutgers Alumni, Rutgers Employees, Seniors (over 62) and Students. The New Brunswick Performing Arts Center (NBPAC) is located at 11 Livingston Avenue in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

For the last four decades, UBW has defied expectations and easy categorization with its bold, narrative storytelling. The very bodies of the seven founding members of UBW – Black women of various shapes and sizes – challenged and changed the landscape of who could be seen on stage as a dancer. The subject matter of the work placed the stories of such women, historically overlooked and undervalued in America, front and center stage. Similarly, UBW remains committed to ensuring that underserved audiences, especially people of color who face systemic barriers to accessing conventional performance, are engaged, invited, and made welcome wherever the company tours.

UBW embraces the power of radical storytelling to activate social change. Whether creating genre-defying work for the stage, guiding the development of Black Women+ choreographers and producers, organizing for justice through art-making, or inspiring leaders across generations, UBW is an innovator, operating at the vanguard.

Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, comprises a vibrant community of more than 1,000 creators—dancers, filmmakers, musicians, theater artists, visual artists, and designers unafraid to take risks as they collaborate with their renowned faculty of professional working artists.

Mason Gross graduates emerge not only with a degree but with a commitment to making innovative and purposeful contributions to the wider community—onstage, backstage, in the gallery, the classroom, the studio, and beyond.

The goal: to cultivate thoughtful, engaged, committed artists embracing art as an ever-changing field of possibility.

The school, just 45 minutes from the crackling energy of New York City’s arts scene, serves as the flagship public arts conservatory at Rutgers, a Big Ten research university, home to more than 67,000 students. Rutgers is the nation’s eighth-oldest institution of higher learning and a member of the prestigious Association of American Universities.