Ruptured Calypso: Jeanette Bain interviews Cynthia Oliver

Cynthia Oliver is a dance artist and Associate Professor of Dance at the University of Illinois. A Bessie (New York Dance and Performance Award) winning choreographer, her work mixes dance theatre and the spoken word, and draws on Caribbean, African and American influences. I met Cynthia while she was on a short trip in London, doing research for a new dance piece, which will premiere next autumn.

JB: How did you get into dance, and how were you introduced to African and Afro-Caribbean forms?

CO: I was the last of six children. My sisters went to dance classes and my parents, who were usually unwilling to let me go out of the house at the time, let me go with them and I loved it. I studied, continued to study, all through high school and I was the one who decided to go on and be a professional. My sisters did it as a hobby, for pleasure, but I was the one who took it to a professional level.

Caribbean dance I got into as a very young person because of my teacher, who had a school called Theatre Dance in St. Croix (U.S. Virgin Islands). Her name was Atti Van den Berg, and she used to dance with the Kurt Jooss Ballet (in Germany). She had a school and she would invite artists from all over the Caribbean, all over the world actually, but she was invested in having Caribbean children know other Caribbean artists. So she brought this gentleman, Montgomery Thomson, from Trinidad, who had danced with Beryl McBurnie, to the island. And he taught classes for a while, took workshops and eventually he decided to move to St Croix. And when he moved he continued teaching with her for a while, and I studied with him. And then he broke off and created his own company and I danced with that company.

So then, I left the island and I went to New York to study professionally, and I left all that behind. I didn’t encounter it again until I started dancing with Ron Brown. Ron Brown had built a reputation of mining the black gay underground for movement vocabulary and it was a beautiful way of moving, a luscious and rhythmically filled way of dancing that he made his own. During a certain period, as any artist does, he was shifting and changing and he got interested in African dance, particularly Sabar. And so, he started to infuse the work of the company with Sabar. So what I would do is (I was so fascinated by this movement, it was incredible stuff)…I would go and then take Sabar classes with other teachers. I would take class with Marie Basse...I forget her last name...in New York. Prior to that there were other places, incidents where I might encounter Caribbean or African performance that I would be particularly drawn to. I remember doing a piece with Pauline Oliveros and Ione, they did an evening length production for Brooklyn Academy of Music called Nginga the Queen King and I was Nginga the dancing spirit and so they had a Congolese teacher there. So, my African studies often came through performance. I would start with the performance and that would spark my interest.
Like in this case, the Congolese was really interesting to me because it felt so much like Calypso. And I thought that there is that hip initiation stuff, the circling of the hips that was amazingly connected to the rhythm of the feet that was really attractive to me. So from that production I then went and started Congolese classes. So similarly with Ron Brown, from working with him, I started seeking out African classes. And then along side that, a couple of my girlfriends from home, from St Croix, were going to Afro-Caribbean classes and they kept telling me about it, and so I decided to start going with them. And I started learning Orisha dances and worked with Ricardo Colon for a little while and then with Richard Gonzalez, who I adore, and I continue to follow when I can. And so that’s how I made that journey. And then what was really interesting was that Ron Brown then shifted from African into Afro-Caribbean but I was gone by then. By then I had set up my own company COCo.Dance.

JB: When you studied Orisha dances, what kind of contexts have you used that in? Have you used that in performance?

CO: I have, I have. It’s been really interesting to me how some of the elements of the Orishas relate to some of the very issues that I am interested in exploring performance wise. I mean intellectually as well as performance but they kind of bleed into my performance stuff. I did a piece on madness and women. There was a solo that I made for an evening performance where it was important for me to use elements of Osun because of her preoccupation with herself and her appearance and how that can either spiral downwards or lead to some other kind of revelation of self. And so, I’ll use it in that way and I’m thinking about this Caribbean piece on transnationalism and I’m thinking about Oya for this piece because of the way the winds flow and how circles of people move and when you look at wind systems the way the wind moves bodies through space. So I’m thinking about Oya. Oya is also a warrior, and so those have been some things that kind of influence how I use that material. But I’m also careful about it because I want to study it. I check with my teacher about it. I don’t want to do it in any kind of way that’s disrespectful, that would harm myself or any of the people that I have asked to work with me on it.

JB: Finally, can you tell me a little bit about the piece that you are working on now?

CO: I’m working on a piece called Rigidigidim De Bamba De: Ruptured Calypso and it’s about Caribbean people in the transnation. I’m particularly interested in Calypso music and how Calypso may or may not be a signifier of Caribbean identity. So, who is familiar with it; how are they familiar with it; whether they are familiar with it at all. How Caribbean people make community outside of the Caribbean region. And it might prove me wrong that Calypso is any part of that at all. But it is interesting to me because it has been one of those places where I have gotten tested as a Caribbean person. I felt as though I have always needed to know Calypso. Even though I didn’t dance it, there were places where you should dance and shouldn’t dance it. How you should dance it. But I needed to know it, whether or not I was actually performing. And that’s in a social situation or in perception of self. So that’s why I had that relationship with it and I wanted to kind of work through that.

I’ve collected an amazing group of people. I have a pick up company so whenever I have a project, I ask people to work with me for that project. I have six women who are going to do this: one is from Liverpool; another is from the Bahamas; I have a friend from the Virgin Islands who I grew up with; a woman who is Trinidadian and Gambian; a woman from Toronto but Guyanese and St Lucian (something like that, I think I have St Lucian right!); and then another woman from Toronto via Jamaica. We premiere in the fall of next year.