Research output per year
Research output per year
Professor, Dance, Special Advisor for Arts, Office of the Chancellor
I am interested in secrets, in the spaces between appropriate and inappropriate behaviors. Intrigued by women’s worlds and the ways we negotiate complicated lives, I investigate these interests physically through movement that explores gesture and the transitory spaces between departure and arrival. My movement is vigorous, sometimes quirky, yet always fully embodied. I use voice and sound in experimental and guttural ways. In my work, choreography and text are intricately intertwined. One cannot exist without the expression of the other. They are a poetic mix of physicality and spoken word, and together they complete a picture.
My aesthetic voice is one located between borders, between and across social, political, economic, gendered, and national boundaries of blackness, of Caribbean-ness, American and African-ness, of womanhood, and the complicated navigation of the human condition. My work plays with the negotiation of the world in which we live from multiple perspectives. Topics I have explored range from the metaphysics of Afro-Caribbean belief and reality, race and the language of fashion, death and mourning, to madness, womanhood, transnationalism and Caribbean mythology. The Caribbean figures greatly in what I do, as it is often the source of my inspiration. It is the place where I became a woman and an artist. It is a place of fascinating contradictions and diversity.
Because of the diversity of people, ideas, and issues in my life and work, I am committed to interdisciplinarity. I am interested in total theatre and inclusivity. I work with a diverse group of artists. They are part of the rich world in which I live and are what make my work rich. I believe the job of art is to express points of view that cause one to pause, to consider and reconsider one’s position/s, and especially to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. I believe art, in its clearest expression, demonstrates a difference and simultaneous unity of experience. I want to get dirty, acknowledge demons, hail the angels, tell secrets, question and celebrate conflicted, complicated, glorious lives fully lived.
Dance Department
907 1/2 W Nevada
M/C 039
uiuc campus mail, IL 00001
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter
Research output: Other contribution › Creative work
Research output: Non-textual form › Performance
10/21/21
1 Media contribution
Press/Media: Press / Media
2/3/21
1 Media contribution
Press/Media: Press / Media
Cynthia Oliver & Leslie Cuyjet
2/15/18
1 item of Media coverage
Press/Media: Press / Media
Oliver, Cynthia (Recipient), 2016
Prize: Prize/Award
Nia Love (Speaker) & Cynthia Oliver (Speaker)
Activity: Talk types › Oral presentation
Cynthia Oliver (Speaker), Leslie Cuyjet (Speaker) & Jaamil Olawale Kosoko (Speaker)
Activity: Talk types › Oral presentation
Cynthia Oliver (Advisory board member)
Activity: Editorial work types › Editorial activity
Cynthia Oliver (Speaker) & Jaamil Olawale Kosoko (Speaker)
Activity: Talk types › Oral presentation
Cynthia Oliver (Invited speaker)
Activity: Talk types › Oral presentation