IN THE PROFESSIONAL ARENA

BOOM!

Choreography and text by Cynthia Oliver in collaboration with Leslie Cuyjet 
Music by Jason Finkelman
Lighting by Amanda Ringger
Costumes by Susan Becker

In BOOM!, both performers are individuals, friends, strangers, family, younger/older versions of themselves, negotiating relations that are persistently in flux. BOOM! began as a short (17 minute) duet featured in Ishmael Houston-Jones’s Parallels in Black Platform Series at Danspace at St. Mark’s Church (2012). The duet was again featured a year later at New York Live Arts (2013), and was subsequently commissioned to be extended and presented in the 2014 New York Live Arts season in its evening-length entirety. BOOM! examines the conditions of the two performing black women, when LIFE happens, when “fairness” and cause and effect do not necessarily align. The evening length BOOM! builds upon Oliver’s signature investigation of slippages in everyday life where truest selves and real life conditions are revealed, where characters betray artifice and persist in the relentless continuous management of multiple social experiences.