Cynthia Oliver Co. Dance Theatre

Turn. Turning. TURNT

July 10 + 12
Schaeffer Theatre

Adult: $40
Student/Senior/Educator: $20
A limited number of $5 tickets will be available to anyone while supplies last!

Tickets on sale June 1st

“Oliver works with members of our community to embody her artwork and present masterful, immersive experiences for her dancers and the audience. There’s music. There are visuals and graphics and singing and language and text. The costuming is incredible. Every single detail is considered equally, and that shows in each and every performance she stages.”

– Jessica Hammie, Smile Politely

Turn. Turning. TURNT  is Cynthia Oliver’s movement meditation tryptic. Tether, Fallow and Summon. Sow. Reap negotiate temporalities and relationships before, during and after collective life changing conditions.   

Cynthia Oliver (choreographer/Director) is a Bronx born, Virgin Island reared dance maker and scholar. Her work incorporates textures of Caribbean performance with African and American aesthetic sensibilities. She has toured the globe as a featured dancer with numerous contemporary dance companies, including David Gordon Pick Up Co., Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE, Bebe Miller, Tere O’Connor Dance and in theatre works by Laurie Carlos, Ntozake Shange, and Deke Weaver. She earned a PhD in performance studies from New York University, is widely published, and has won numerous awards including a New York Dance and Performance (BESSIE) Award, United States Artist, Doris Duke and Guggenheim Fellowships. She is a Gutgsell Professor of Dance at the University of Illinois and Special Advisor to the Chancellor for Arts Integration. 

www.cynthiaoliver.com/ IG: @olicynt

Turn. Turning. TURNT is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation Fund Project co-commissioned by Lead Partner / Bates Dance Festival, in partnership with Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago, Red Eye Theater of Minneapolis, The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and NPN. The Creation Fund is supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Ford Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency). For more information: www.npnweb.org. TURNT is supported in part by the Illinois Arts Council, with additional commissioning funds provided by Harlem Stage’s WaterWorks program and a technical residency at the Maya Brin Institute for New Performance at the School of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies – University of Maryland, College Park. Other support has been provided by the Doris Duke Foundation and the Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The National Performance Network is the Fiscal Sponsor of Turn. Turning. TURNT/Cynthia Oliver Co. Dance Theatre (COCo)TURNT is a triptych made up of three movement experiments explored before, during, and “after” (if there is one) the global pandemic. Tether, is an AfroFuturistic aspirational experiment. A meditation on black girls’ creativity, drawn from double dutch practices as life skill training. Fallow, was a direct response to where we collectively were in 2021– run ragged by ever changing threats, pivoting quickly and persistently. Yet determined to slow, to stop. Summon. Sow. Reap. considers  what we have summoned post-fallow, what seeds are sown, and just or unjust rewards we reap. We collect, reflect and return, more fiercely, to moving, remembering, hoping, and recovering ourselves for a world anew.