Artist's Statement
I am a community-driven dance artist and choreographer. Movement is my favorite kind of language. In movement, I feel ownership of my body that I do not experience in other work. Ballet technique heavily influences my movement vocabulary. As a performer, I strive to display my impulse towards movement and my condition as a human unselfconsciously. I value dance as a meditative and performative practice to explore and articulate humanity and the world that we live in.
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I remain within the culture and the industry of dance to create space for myself and my fellow dance artists to move and present ourselves authentically. I approach my work from a community-grounded queer feminist lens. I strive to create dance environments that actively endorse every body as a dancing body. My choreography is tied to the concerns, emotions, and experiences of the dancers and the audience I am working with. It exists as a direct response to current events and my community’s desires and needs. I aspire to create work which is visually and conceptually accessible to the audience. It embraces gestural and literal interpretations of concepts explored in the work. I desire to create work which invites the audience to consider themselves dancers. I believe that we are all artists in our own right and that tapping into artistic impulses brings us closer to our sense of humanity. I hope that my work builds connections between the audience and the dancers in order to cultivate caring and curious community.
Photo by Machmer Media
Photo by Machmer Media
Biography
Oliver Vi Myers (he/they) began their dance training at the age of eight at Littleton Ballet Academy under the direction of Alison and Bobbie Jaramillo. In his nine years at LBA, he trained primarily in ballet, while also taking classes in tap, jazz, modern, and musical theatre. For seven years, Oliver was a member of Littleton Youth Ballet. As part of the company, they performed in many story ballets including Snow White, The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, Hansel and Gretel, and The Nutcracker. His favorite roles include Lollipops, Angel corps (Hansel and Gretel), Snow corps, and Russian (The Nutcracker). Each summer, Oliver attended LBA’s summer intensive, where they studied with studio faculty as well as with artists of Colorado Ballet, including Lorita Travaglia, Bryce Lee, Fransisco Estevez, Dana Benton, and Sharon Wehner. ​
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Oliver joined the Colorado State University Dance program in the Fall of 2021. He have been selected to perform at least once each semester, including in the opera Dido and Aneas, many student and capstone works, and in faculty choreography by professors Chung-Fu Chang, Madeline Harvey, and Susie Garifi. They also performed in guest artist Vincent Thomas’s work “What’s Goin’ On Suite” in spring of 2022. Oliver's Resonant Body solo and lecture demonstration was created as
an Honors project for CSU Dance’s Repertory Engagement Course and was performed across Colorado, from Sterling to Gunnison and at TEDxCSU 2023. Their ensemble choreographic debut, Body: to be seen, was selected for CSU’s 2023 Fall Dance Concert. Since December 2021, Oliver has served as a research assistant to Professor Madeline Harvey on the Movement Through Parenthood project. In that role, they have taught dance workshops, revised study materials, and authored conference proposals. Oliver co-presented at the 2022 NATS conference and 2023 NDEO conference with the Movement Through Parenthood team. In his time at CSU, Oliver has been awarded the Green and Gold, Honors, Creative and Performing Arts-Dance, Green and Gold Performing Arts, and Irmel Louise Williams Fagan Dance scholarships.
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In fall of 2023, Oliver interned as a dance teacher at Laurel Elementary School where he taught kindergarten through 2nd grade lessons on elements of dance, hip hop, salsa, and ballet folklórico. The lessons integrated dance with social-emotional learning and Oliver was a panelist on the program at the 2023 NDEO conference. In addition to their Dance degree, Oliver is also studying Fish, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology at CSU. He volunteers in CSU’s Biology Teaching Collection and has worked as a field tech with Colorado Parks and Wildlife and the Colorado Natural Heritage Program. They are interested in community-driven science and the conservation of bats, small mammals, reptiles, and amphibians. In winter of 2023-24, Oliver traveled to Ghana to study West African and afrobeats dance through community engagement and transnational solidarity with CSU’s Ethnic Studies and Women and Gender Studies departments.
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Outside of their academic work, Oliver loves backpacking, knitting, reading, and queer history. They have been skiing longer than they’ve been dancing and have skied at nearly every resort in Colorado. Oliver is also a member of the Knits of the Round Table, CSU’s campus knitting club. He is grateful to his friends, family, faculty, and mentors for their support of his ambitious academic and career pursuits. After completing their undergraduate degrees, Oliver plans to pursue professional concert dance and choreography before returning to graduate school to study conservation biology.