Leslie Cuyjet
For All Your Life
July 24
Schaeffer Theatre
Adult: $40
Student/Senior/Educator: $20
A limited number of $5 tickets will be available to anyone while supplies last!
“Leslie Cuyjet is a master of layers.”
– Dance Enthusiast
For All Your Life is an ongoing performance project that examines the value of black life and black death, through the mechanism of life insurance. In the presentation, Brooklyn-based choreographer Leslie Cuyjet delivers a seminar that teaches us about the insurance industry and its direct connection to the transatlantic slave trade, highlights the way we respond to death, and provokes a reflection on how we regard life.
Leslie Cuyjet is a choreographer, dancer and writer whose multidisciplinary practice weaves together dance, video, text and installation. Her work functions as a living archive, tracing both personal and collective memory. Born breech in Illinois, the family story goes that she “came into this world dancing,” feet first and kicking. After arriving in New York in 2004, Cuyjet spent years as a performer for a diverse group of downtown choreographers and artists, including Cynthia Oliver, Jane Comfort, David Gordon, Niall Jones, Juliana F. May, Narcissister and Will Rawls. Her choreographic voice is driven by interrogating these experiences as a performer through the lens of the black body, and questions how the performer is perceived, staged, and remembered. Cuyjet’s solo performances and installations present these intersections of history, personal narrative and the politics of presence as pathways to visibility and black embodiment. Her work has been presented at venues like BAM, ICA Boston, EMPAC, The Kitchen, The Shed, MoMA PS1, Center for Performance Research, SculptureCenter, and The Chocolate Factory Theater.
Cuyjet has garnered recognition and support with a Guggenheim Fellowship, Princeton’s Hodder Fellowship, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants for Artists; with residency support from Sarah Michelson at David Zwirner, Performance Space New York, MacDowell, Chinati Foundation, Watermill Center, and Movement Research. She is also the recipient of two New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Awards. Cuyjet is a graduate of the inaugural cohort of the Goldman Sachs One Million Black Women: Black in Business program; and proudly served as co-editor for the online journal Critical Correspondence for two years. She received a B.F.A. in Dance from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She currently resides in Brooklyn, NY.
For All Your Life was originally commissioned by and performed at The Chocolate Factory Theater in New York and developed with residency support from the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM).
Funded in part by the New England States Touring program of the New England Foundation for the Arts, made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and the six New England state arts agencies.
