IN THE PROFESSIONAL ARENA

BOOM!

Choreography and Text by Cynthia Oliver in collaboration with Leslie Cuyjet

Performed by Cynthia Oliver and Leslie Cuyjet

Music by Jason Finkelman

Lighting by Amanda Ringger

Costumes by Susan Becker

Premiered in its full evening form at New York Live Arts, (New York, NY), 2014

In BOOM!, both performers are individuals, friends, strangers, family, younger/older versions of themselves, negotiating relations that are persistently in flux. BOOM! began as a short (17 minute) duet, curated by Bebe Miller and featured in Ishmael Houston-Jones’s Parallels in Black Platform Series at Danspace at St. Mark’s Church (2012). The duet was again featured a year later at New York Live Arts (2013), and was subsequently commissioned to be extended and presented in the 2014 New York Live Arts season in its evening-length entirety. BOOM! explores the conditions of the two black women, when LIFE happens, when “fairness” and cause and effect do not necessarily align. How do we manage? How do we respond? What do we do for and with each other? The evening-length BOOM! builds upon what has become my  signature investigation of slippages in everyday life where truest selves and real life conditions are revealed, where characters betray artifice and persist in the relentless continuous management of multiple social experiences.