Research output per year
Research output per year
Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Professor of Dance, Special Advisor to the Chancellor for Arts Integration
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: Non-textual form › Choreography
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter
Research output: Non-textual form › Performance
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter
2/8/24
1 Media contribution
Press/Media: Press / Media
Freeburg, C., Ruggles, D. F., Gammie, C. F., Imlay, J. A., Nahrstedt, K., Leakey, A., Oliver, C., Roberts, B. W. & Mouza, C.
1/11/24
1 Media contribution
Press/Media: Press / Media
10/21/21
1 Media contribution
Press/Media: Press / Media
2/3/21
1 Media contribution
Press/Media: Press / Media
Oliver, C. (Invited speaker)
Activity: Talk types › Oral presentation
Martin, R. (Participant), Rivera-Servera, R. (Participant), Oliver, C. (Participant) & Wong, Y. (Participant)
Activity: Attendance types › Participation in workshop, seminar, course
Oliver, C. (Speaker), Cuyjet, L. (Speaker) & Kosoko, J. O. (Speaker)
Activity: Talk types › Oral presentation
Love, N. (Speaker) & Oliver, C. (Speaker)
Activity: Talk types › Oral presentation
Oliver, C. (Speaker) & Kosoko, J. O. (Speaker)
Activity: Talk types › Oral presentation