Urban Bushwomen Performance

Urban Bushwomen at the UGA Fine Arts Center, Friday, January 23rd, 2015 at 8:00 p.m.

My classmates and I enjoyed this dance performance by the Urban Bushwomen, and I'm glad Dr. Cahnmann-Taylor gave us an opportunity to attend. Our class accompanied her undergraduate group, some other graduate students, and her family to dinner and then to the performance. The whole evening felt like a community experience, and it was nice to talk about the event with other people who are passionate about the arts and arts-based research.

Some of the choreographic and narrative techniques the artistic director used reminded me of the arts-based research and the memoirs I have read in the past, both for Dr. Cahnmann Taylor's LLED/QUAL 8590 class and Dr. Niemann's Creative Nonfiction class at KSU. Jawole Willa Jo Zollar narrated her family's story of migration from Texas to Kansas City as the dancers moved to the rhythm of her words. She said her story was a combination of facts, memories, and legends. All of her story was true, but not all of it was factual, or capital "T" truth as we discuss in my Qualitative Research 8400 class. What I love about memoir stories and performances is that truth doesn't always have to be literal, but it is still important to learn of people's experiences, especially those who have been oppressed or marginalized. In a way, I think Jawole's story was both narrative and ethnographic, as she was telling the history of her family and of the cities in which they lived. Some of her memories were painful, yet she and the dancers very skillfully turned painful experiences into art.

Ethnography and narrative inquiry use a combination of fact, memory, and personal anecdotes to tell stories. We hear the truth from one person's lens, yet it is an important truth to understand to give us access to stories that might otherwise be untold. Although many of the resulting articles are written as more traditional research articles, they serve some of the same purposes of memoirs, the dance performance described above, and other artistic representations of people and culture. Through the understanding of mutual purpose, I believe more people will become even more open to artistic methodologies in qualitative research.