SCHOLARSHIP / WRITINGS
I write in a number of forms. As an academic, I have written straight-up conventional academic texts. However, more recently I have been interested in less formal writing, in writing that is as experimental as my thinking, as my teaching, as my dance-making. Below are descriptions of many of those projects over time. Some are available easily in libraries as full texts, or part of edited volumes. Others are less formal in form and in their access. If you are interested in those, please reach out and ask. I may have copies I can share, though some are gone with time (i.e. writings published in the early days of the internet that no longer exist).
Race matters - remember who created it (2021)
Black Manifesto! A podcast project by Nora Chipaumire
We’ll start with an easy question, “Does race matter?” In this episode, Pawlet Brookes and Cynthia Oliver explore the ninth commandment, “Race matters, who created it? Long live James Baldwin.” Cynthia Oliver is a Bronx born, Virgin Island reared, award winning choreographer and performance artist. In her conversation with Pawlet, Cynthia reflects on the shared experience of Blackness around the world, the reality (and construct) of race, identity, activism, and Black womanhood.
My Voice, My Practice: Choreographing Black Personhood (2020)
This paper was commissioned as part of the “10 Years, 10 Countries, 10 Voices: Black Classics” program, published and launched as part of the LDIF20 Finale in Leicester UK. This work examines the national, albeit global conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic which highlighted environments in which black artists and black art has been made, how I do so with choreography as my vehicle, and using the making of works in my archive from Death’s Door (1995); to Unremovable Jacket (1997); SHEMAD (2000); BOOM! (2012) and Virago Man-Dem (2017) to discuss the ways in which choreographic thinking and the dancing body are my mechanisms for filtering, negotiating, questioning and challenging the world in which we live.
Virago-Man Dem: In Process Showings (2018)
An essay detailing the improvisational processes we created for portions of my evening-length performance work, Virago-Man Dem as we were investigating intimacies in sections of the choreography. At the Institute for Contemporary Art at University of Pennsylvania, I charged the dancers with a particular challenge to address - in close proximity of the audience - each of the four experiment/performances we conducted in January of 2017. Performers: Duane Cyrus, Jonathan Gonzalez, Niall Noel Jones, Shamar Watt. In Endless Shout – an exhibition extension of the historic “Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music 1965- Now” originally at MCA Chicago.
They Say It Is Heaven (2018)
A short essay in the Brooklyn Rail on my creative process. It is torturous, breathtaking, tedious, enlightening, gratifying, and most often a must. This brief essay tells of my step by step entry in the studio, what I am considering as I do so and how I make it from the floor to finally having a work to speak of. In online magazine, the Brooklyn Rail.
Holy Rolling, Strength Training, Eye Attuning, Dance Making (2018)
An essay that articulated my personal experience with a “holy roller” great aunt whose participation in a Pentacostal church in the American south deeply influenced my understanding of movement, faith and religious fervor. The participation of the community, individual and collective bodies moving were eruptive, surprising and transformative. Those days in that small clapboard church in the woods impacted how I think about choreography, who makes it and who can be uplifted by it. In Dancing Platform Praying Grounds: Blackness, Churches, and Downtown Dance, Edited by Reggie Wilson for Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church.
Epiphanic Moments (2018)
A lyric essay detailing the messy politics of a career in dance. The work is the result of conversations of numerous peers, students, and others over the years about the conditions under which we make, perform, view, and support dance. It is a messy, heady, and yes politically charged environment that hasn’t often acknowledged those elements. I try in this essay to lay them bare. In The Oxford Handbook on Dance and Politics. Eds. Randy Martin, Rebekah Kowal & Gerald Siegmund.
Laurie Carlos’ Breath Dance (2017)
A poetic piece honoring the life and work of Laurie Carlos, Oliver's long time mentor, devoted friend. Published in 2017 in magazine Girls Like Us, an edition devoted to dance and many who have significantly influenced current dance artists.
“Flipping the script: Renegotiating notions of haitian women in the global imagination.”
In Kehinde Wiley’s World Stage: Haiti Exhibition Book. Los Angeles, CA (2015)
An essay discussing Wiley’s reputation as an artists whose project has been to recast the image of the black male in the public imagination. He has turned his attention to Haitian women and has utilized a queen show as a part of tat equation. I discuss the island’s history with pageantry and bring it forward with a look at Haiti’s women that upends the poverty and violence we are barraged with in the media.
Dancing the Black Avant Garde (2014)
Black dance artists who have lived in the world of the avant garde, “downtown dance” scene in New York, and the national and international experimental arenas, experience tenuous associations with the larger (albeit imagined) black community of dance particularly in the United States. Often considered “outsider art” or even “white,” postmodern dance aesthetics that have been embraced by black makers and performers has set those creators in a realm of the in-between. In this paper, I consider how we categorize our work, how that work is received by differing constituencies, and where it is ultimately located both in terms of venue and geographic access.
A movement in lockstep (on duets) (2013)
Black dance artists who have lived in the world of the avant garde, “downtown dance” scene in New York, and the national and international experimental arenas, experience tenuous associations with the larger (albeit imagined) black community of dance particularly in the United States. Often considered “outsider art” or even “white,” postmodern dance aesthetics that have been embraced by black makers and performers has set those creators in a realm of the in-between. In this paper, I consider how we categorize our work, how that work is received by differing constituencies, and where it is ultimately located both in terms of venue and geographic access.
Rigidigidim de bamba de: a calypso journey from start to… (2010)
Rigidigidim is a chronicling of the process of creating the dance theatre work Rigidigidim De Bamba De: Ruptured Calypso from Oliver’s earliest considerations of transnationalism in her personal recollection of a conversation with her father in St. Croix and his recognition of calypso wafting over the radio in the 1950s Caribbean to her recent travels to Toronto and London to excavate the role of the music in the lives of contemporary Caribbeans. This journey then takes her to New York City where she discovers her cast and the circularity of the research and performance structure of the ultimate work. This essay weaves the research with the creative process inherent in the making of the dance work and demonstrates the interrelatedness of the processes.
(In Caribbean Dance vol. 2. Susanna Sloat, Ed. University Press of Florida. 2009)
Queen of the virgins: pagaentry and the black womanhood in the caribbean (2009)
Queen of the Virgins uses the “queen show” or beauty pageant as a platform to discuss the psychic shift black women experienced as they moved from slave to freewoman, indentured servant to political activist, civic organizer to territorial representative in her journey from debasement to one of celebration. This work is a comprehensive examination via performance, of women’s roles in the production of culture, in the history of race and class relations, and of modernization and globalization in the U.S. Virgin Islands. By examining the black female performing on local stages as they relate to global pageants, Queen of the Virgins discusses the intricacies of Afro-Caribbean politics, gender relations, and aesthetic sensibilities as they affect communities in the region and our appearances to the broader world community. (University of Mississippi Press, 2009)
