In 2020, Duke Performances presented the Urban Bush Women’s (UBW) groundbreaking virtual Artist Journal — an experimental Zoom-based performance combining dance party, conversation, and audience participation. Celebrating its thirty-seventh active year, the formidable Brooklyn-based performance ensemble returns to the proscenium stage with Hair & Other Stories, an evening-length dance-theater work that remains both timely and timeless in its exploration of race, identity, and ideas of beauty through the lens of Black women’s hair.

Choreographed and directed by UBW Co-Artistic Directors Chanon Judson and Samantha Speis, Hair & Other Stories is an interactive experience inspired by UBW Founder and 2021 MacArthur Fellow Jawole Willa Jo Zollar’s HairStories (2001).

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Current Duke Performances COVID-19 regulations

Hair & Other Stories is a dance-theater work that explores race, identity, and ideas of beauty through the lens of Black women’s hair. It reflects on what constitutes freedom, liberation, and release in our everyday struggles to rise to our Extra-ordinary Selves in extraordinary times. This is the urgent dialogue of the twenty-first century.

Hair & Other Stories is an experience for nontraditional spaces, where performers and the audience may connect and interact with one another.