The Spurlock Museum’s Contemporary Conversations series instigates conversations around contemporary cultural issues, themes, and ideas. In connection with our temporary exhibit, "Blues Dancing and Its African American Roots," we have convened a conversation with the professional dancers, choreographers, and educators, Dr. Thomas F. DeFrantz and Dr. Cynthia Oliver.
This Zoom event will also be available using FB Live.
Bios about the participants:
Cynthia Oliver is a prolific and award-winning dancemaker from St. Croix, Virgin Islands. Her work joins textures from the Caribbean, Africa, and the United States. Oliver has toured the globe as a featured dancer, with the contemporary companies David Gordon Pick Up Co., Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE, Bebe Miller Company, and Tere O'Connor Dance. She has appeared as an actor in works by Laurie Carlos, Greg Tate, Ione, Ntozake Shange, and Deke Weaver. She earned her doctorate in Performance Studies from New York University, is widely published, and has won numerous awards, including a New York Dance and Performance (BESSIE) Award, for her choreography. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she is a professor in the dance department, affiliate in African American and Gender & Women’s Studies, University Scholar, and recent Center for Advanced Study inductee. She currently serves as Associate Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation in the Humanities, Arts, and Related Fields. Her most recent evening-length performance work, “Virago-Man Dem,” premiered at Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival in New York, toured the country, and closed here at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts in the fall of 2018.
Thomas F. DeFrantz is Professor in the Department of African and African American Studies and the Program in Dance. DeFrantz is also core graduate faculty in Computational Media, Arts, and Culture at Duke University. DeFrantz’s expertise is in Black expressive cultures and their impacts on everyday life.DeFrantz studied music composition and computer science as an undergraduate. Currently, DeFrantz directs SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology, a research group that explores emerging technology in live performance. The group deploys bespoke live-processing systems in performance, crafting interfaces that translate movements into light and sound to underscore the creative concerns at hand. DeFrantz taught for the Mobile MFA in Dance at the University of Arts, Lion’s Jaw Festival, Movement Research MELT, ImPulsTanz, and the New Waves Institute. DeFrantz also held faculty positions at Hampshire College, Stanford University, Yale University, MIT, NYU, and the University of Nice. In 2017, DeFrantz received the Outstanding Research in Dance award from the Dance Studies Association. DeFrantz is a consultant for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, contributing concept and voice-over for the permanent installation on Black Social Dance, which opened with the museum in 2016. In 2013, working with Takiyah Nur Amin, DeFrantz founded the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance (CADD), a growing consortium of 300 researchers committed to exploring, promoting, and engaging African diaspora dance as a resource and method of aesthetic identity.