CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Award-winning choreographer and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign dance professor Cynthia Oliver created a triptych of three interconnected dance pieces that will be performed Oct. 2-3 at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts.
“Turn. Turning. TURNT.” is a meditation on negotiating time and relationships through collective life-changing conditions. Oliver described the work as a journey of recovery, remembrance and reimagining — an artistic call to rebuild and move forward with renewed purpose.
The three works were initially staged with Illinois dance students.
“Revisiting these works is a chance for me to realize them to the extent that I wanted. When you’re working in the university calendar, time is significantly shorter. This really afforded me time to explore and fine-tune and perfect to the best of my ability the vision that I had,” Oliver said.
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The triptych will feature six professional dancers who are all U. of I. dance alumni: Oluwadamilare Ayorinde; Illinois dance professor Paige Cunningham; Leslie Cuyjet, who has worked with Oliver for decades; Nik Owens; Angie Pittman; and Kendra Portier.
Ayorinde, Cuyjet, Owens and Pittman each appeared in the original productions of one of the three works and brought continuity to the expanded versions of the dances, Oliver said.
The first of the three works, “Tether,” debuted in February Dance of 2019. The Afrofuturistic work is inspired by Double Dutch jump roping to consider Black girls’ play and the coordination, cooperation and resilience it requires. The dance features speed, rhythm and a focus on the connections between who is holding the rope and who is in its throes.
Oliver choreographed “Fallow” as we emerged from sheltering in place for the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The work reflects where we were energetically. There is a lot of quick changing of direction, repetition, then a forced shift of energy, representative of how performing artists in particular had to shut it down,” she said.
“Summon. Sow. Reap.” represents coming back together and looking toward a hopeful and more upbeat future. The work features individual movement with a lot of improvisation and moments of dancing in intense unison. Oliver said she was interested in “how a global pandemic changed how we see things, and what inspires us to make or reconfigure things in a particular way.”
Oliver has a longtime working relationship with her production team for “Turn. Turning. TURNT.” Jason Finkelman, the artistic director for the Global Arts Performance Initiatives and Oliver’s husband, wrote the electronic music for the piece, with contributions from Joy Yang on piano, James Mauck on drums and engineer Mark White. Graphic design professor Stacey Robinson worked on the visual elements; art professor Susan Becker did the costume design; and Amanda Ringger and Yingman Tang created the lighting design.
Oliver said the lighting features saturated color and the costumes are futuristic, with a variety of textures and patterns, including Africanist patterns, and mesh and sheer fabrics.
“Turn. Turning. TURNT.” had its world premiere in July at the Bates Dance Festival in Lewiston, Maine. After the Krannert Center performances, it has tour dates in Brooklyn, New York; Chicago; and Minneapolis, Minnesota, through May 2027.
