CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Keeping pace with dancer-choreographer Cynthia Oliver is always a challenge. The woman knows how to move.
But this year, with two major projects going public almost simultaneously, Oliver, also a professor of dance at the University of Illinois, has been pumping up the tempo even by her own standards.
Last month, Oliver's dance multi-layered, 55-minute dance collage "Rigidigidim De Bamba De: Ruptured Calypso" premiered at the Painted Bride Art Center Philadelphia, then moved to New York City for a three-night run at Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church. In New York, it received favorable reviews and played to enthusiastic audiences, according to Oliver.
"The last night, we had to turn people away," said the dance maker, who drew from her experience and familiarity with Caribbean culture in creating the piece. Oliver's research and development of the work overlapped her national touring and residency schedule for Bebe Miller's 90-minute multi-media production "Necessary Beauty."
In between the cracks of creating her own work, casting and directing it (but, for the first time, not actually dancing in it), and performing with Miller's touring company, Oliver also was applying a final coat of polish on her book "Queen of the Virgins: Pageantry and Black Womanhood in the Caribbean." It was published in August by University Press of Mississippi.
Both the book and the performances - which will travel to at least three other venues in 2010 - share an emphasis on Caribbean social, political and cultural history and the contributions of women to that history.
Although she was born in New York City, Oliver moved with her family to St. Croix, in the Virgin Islands, when she was 8 years old. When she was 16, she graduated from high school and returned to New York to pursue higher education and a career in dance.
During her childhood in St. Croix, Oliver was exposed to the islands' "queen culture."
"From the time you're a toddler until you are putting one foot in the grave, there's a pageant for you," she said, paraphrasing a theater director she interviewed for the book.
The U. of I. dance professor experienced the queen culture first-hand when she was crowned queen of Miss St. Dunstan's High School in 1976. As a result of her experience - which she described as "highly competitive, contentious and uncomfortable" - she said she had always hoped to revisit the subject at some point, when she possessed "the right tools to examine it."
"I wanted to understand why people would subject themselves to that," Oliver said.
To do so, she sifted through, studied and analyzed historical and performative material, and also considered issues, concerns and values central to the culture throughout its history.
"The fact that we had had pageantry as a highly valued part of our expressive culture from the beginning until this point was important," she said.
"It is often devalued as this kind of clueless or empty concern of women who just want to look pretty and parade in front of people," she said. But, in fact, "it has a much more complicated history and present than that related to how people negotiate who they are in terms of gender, sexuality, race, their relationship to notions of modernity, how they express culture, and what they think their avenues to success are for fulfilling their dreams.
"How people - particularly women - negotiate a whole range of circumstances is a big part of this, because I think women disappear in the history of the culture of the place."
In contrast, women are out front, visible - and large and in charge, as a presence - in Oliver's "Rigidigidim," a series of vignettes that tell a story through dance, music, video and theater. The title of the piece, she said, derives from a traditional Caribbean phrase that signals "a call to party - to come together and fete."
Also taking center stage in the production - with the all-female cast of dancers - is the expressive, highly rhythmic lifeblood of the region: calypso music and dance.
"The piece is tied together through these dance moments, visual moments and what we call "deconstruction of the wine" - these moments in which we talk about the movement of the body in calypso dancing," Oliver said. "That is the comic relief. It is also instructional - information that we give to the audience to place a kind of question mark on the practice (of calypso dancing), because historically, any kind of practice of black bodies moving from the waist down has been deemed unrespectable.
"We question all that, and ask the audience to question that," she said. "We also look at ideas around the sacred and the secular. So, there are a lot of things that are pulled up in the experience."
Members of Oliver's touring company are A 'Keitha Carey, Nehassaiu deGannes, Ithalia Forel, Lisa Green, Caryn Hodge and Rosamond S. King.
Giving the piece added authenticity was Oliver's insistence, when casting the work, that the dancers all have roots in the Caribbean.
"Often I'm just interested in performance quality; this time, I wanted to have people who knew this form in their bones."
In fact, that detail was so important that Oliver didn't even care if members of the troupe were not all professional dancers. The group includes one dancer who also is an accomplished actor; another is a performance artist, and yet another is a poet and high school friend from St. Croix.
While some are still based in the Caribbean, others have secondary ties to immigrant communities in Canada and England. And that uprooting and rerooting of the culture elsewhere is of interest to Oliver as a storyteller as well.
"Since I was thinking about the separation of Caribbean people from whatever their notion of home was, this Caribbean diaspora, I was particularly interested in folks who had gone to London and Toronto," she said. "I decided that the rupture was an important concept to work with."
In producing the piece, Oliver worked closely with her husband, Jason Finkelman, who served as the project's sound designer and composer. Together, they collaborated with lighting designer Amanda Ringger, also from St. Croix, and German filmmaker Marcus Behrens, who traveled with the team on location in London and Toronto as they were developing the piece. He also shot footage of the dancers on location, incorporating his material into a film, which is projected during the live performances.
In 2010, "Rigidigidim" will travel to the Central District Forum for Arts and Ideas in Seattle, Feb. 19-20; the Dance Place in Washington, D.C., Feb. 27-28; and Bates Dance Festival, Lewiston, Maine, July 24-25.