Today's story comes from Cynthia Oliver's artist profile on the blog in late August.

Can you talk about your performing career with artists like Bebe Miller, Ronald K. Brown, and Tere O’Connor? How did you land these gigs (auditions, seen in class, etc)?

With Tere, we were chatting with David Thomson at my 50^th Birthday party, and Tere asked if David and I had ever worked together. David and I realized that in all the years we knew each other – in that tiny population of black people in the “downtown” New York dance world in the 80s and early 90s – we had not.  Tere said he would make something for us. We laughed and said, “Yeah. We’ll hold you to that.” But we didn’t have to. He called the next spring and said, “Let’s do it!” And he made Sister as the third of his three pieces that would inspire the larger work BLEED.

So with each of these performing experiences, a lot of it was time. Getting to know each other and seeing our trajectories as harmonious and compatible, even if we didn’t always agree. There is a high regard, a deep respect for one another, and I honestly love all these people.

Can you talk about dancing in Sister, and your growth as a performer over time? What do you continue to love about performing? What are you exploring right now in your performing work? 

Sister was a challenge for two reasons: I was still recovering from the ravages of cancer treatment (chemo) on my body despite having made the duet BOOM!, which premiered in 2012 (with Leslie Cuyjet), and because it was the first time in a long time that I was the dancer/collaborator and not the maker of the work. I hadn’t been in someone else’s work since Bebe’s Necessary Beauty in 2008. This was 2013. So five years had elapsed and that is a LONG time for a performer. But I was up for the challenge, as it was also a moment for me to reclaim my body from illness and to be in a space with two men I adore and trust to make something uniquely for us. It was hard tho. Tere doesn’t suffer fools. He is a choreographer’s choreographer and his concern is about the shape and detail of the work. If your body hurts (which happens way more often at 50 than it does at 20, 30, or even 40!), you gotta figure it out and work through it because his concern is outside of that. That’s the dancer's world to negotiate. That’s our job. His resides in the piece itself. So we laughed a lot – a strategy he also uses to get you to somehow do what you think yourself incapable of. At the same time, he built something fabulously designed for David and I. It brought together many parts of us and then some. It enlivened worlds of reference that might be placed upon our bodies in the contemporary world without our consent and those that we consciously proffer and perform. We talked about all of this and about David and my own experiences as Caribbean people. This for me, is the thing I love about performing, not necessarily the performing itself, which is nice to share the work with others and hear about their experience, but more the intimacies of each process and the ways we make these worlds that we live in for a time which we then change. It changed as we toured and then it was gone. And now we are all on to other/new things. We move. That’s dance right? 

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To read more, there is an interview with Cynthia and David on Culturebot.

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