Cynthia Oliver was one of four artists funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to come to MANCC multiple times over the course of three years. This multi-year support enables choreographers who are familiar with MANCC and its resources to advance their research in a series of well-planned residences with the potential to include more collaborators and pull in more technical support. Such support results in a more substantial investment in the work for the artists, their commissioning partners, and audiences. It also offers the choreographer the opportunity to anchor their ongoing work at MANCC without immediately knowing the results of their research, allowing an opportunity to build the work into what it is going to be before the artist is asked to frame it for funding and touring purposes.

In her second residency, Oliver continued to develop her project, Virago-Man Dem. In preparation for her Fall 2018 premiere in New York City, Oliver was able to clarify casting choices by bringing two understudy dancers into the studio to rehearse and experiment with other core company members. Her composer, Jason Finkelman and lighting designer, Amanda Ringer began to develop and finalize scenic elements including lighting, video projection and sound, while Oliver and the dancers continued to hone the live elements of the performance. Costume designer Susan Becker utilized resources of the FSU costume shop to further costume designs.

The residency culminated in an informal showing of the work, followed by an open discussion of feedback with Oliver and her collaborators. The showing was attended by faculty and students of the FSU School of Dance, as well as the Departments of Theater, Visual Art, and Modern Languages.  Several Tallahassee community members who connected with Oliver during her first residency were able to attend as well.

Virago-Man Dem had its world premiere as part of BAM's Next Wave Festival, October 25-28, 2017, at Brooklyn Academy of Music's Fisher Space.

In Virago-Man Dem, Visiting Artist Cynthia Oliver turns her gaze toward a nuanced exploration of the masculine,probing the performance of its constituent elements’ reciprocal relationship to culture and locale. Reflecting on the core query that drives Virago-Man Dem Oliver asks, “How can/does a woman choreograph masculinity, without resorting to stereotypes but instead locate its nuances, challenges and ambiguities?”

Oliver and her collaborators, an all male cast of predominantly US-based, Afro-Caribbean dancers/performers, John Jennings (visual artist), Jason Finkelman [composer] and Fred Moten (writer) used the residency to unearth nuances, unspoken codes and overt expressions of black masculinity in both movement and spoken language. Drawing upon her extensive background in contemporary dance from Africanist and Euro-American cultural frameworks as well as her deep involvement in avant-garde theatrical traditions by black women in North America, Oliver created and directed these findings into a layered and complex choreography of non-linear movement, oral text and visual projections that move from dance to word to sound to image and back again, toward an eclectic and provocative dance theatre.

Like Virago, Oliver’s existing body of work is animated by the concerns and approaches of her scholarly research and writing, which largely probe the knowledge and material that resides at the intersection of contemporary dance, feminism, black popular culture and the expressive performances of Africans in the diaspora. Her recent interests include asserting the presence and complex negotiations of black artists in contemporary “avant-garde,” “experimental,” or neo-postmodern dance arenas.  She writes on the politics of the dance scene in the US, on relations between dance and other contemporary art movements, and the lives of black women in the Caribbean as evinced by her book, “Queen of the Virgins: Pageantry and Womanhood in the Caribbean” published by University Press of Mississippi in 2009.

Along with dance-based research in the studio, while at MANCC Oliver and her collaborative team held follow up conversations with FSU scholars Dr. Doug Schrock (Sociology) and Dr. Patrick Mason (Economics/Director of FSU’s African American Studies program), as well as Public Intellectual/Artist Summer Hill Seven. These discussions were initiated in January, when Oliver conducted a preliminary site visit to introduce and familiarize herself with the Tallahassee community. During that site visit, she met with Will Jones and Bruce Martin, Assistant Coaches for FAMU Men's Basketball Team, Dr. Shelby Chipman, FAMU Associate Director of Bands, Cesar Lopez, Street Outreach Advocate with Capital City Youth Services and Dr. Jennifer Atkins, School of Dance Faculty, as well as with Dr. Schrock, Dr. Mason and Summer Hill Seven. Additionally, Oliver shared the work-in-progress, followed by a discussion.

Virago-Man Dem premiered at Gibney Dance in New York in 2017. This residency was made possible by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.