The choreographer and performer, Leslie Cuyjet’s multilayered solo, “For All Your Life,” makes its BAM debut Dec. 3-7. Cuyjet investigates the value of Black life and death, “draw[ing] on the life insurance industry for method and metaphor to then interrogate the value of life and death through a screening, a sales pitch, and a deep look into the life insurance industry’s historical ties to slavery, revealing how systems of power have long monetized human lives — particularly Black lives,” notes the release.
Cuyjet responded to the questions below about her work exclusively for the AmNews.
Take away your Guggenheim Fellowship, your Bessie, and the many well-deserved accolades you’ve gotten in your career as a performer and choreographer. How would you like our AmNews readers to know you?
I used to say, “A black dot on a white wall.” Examining how I’ve navigated my career and the stages I’ve performed on is at the heart of all my creations. Working professionally as a performer for over 20 years, I started to zoom out and consider how my body (technical and fluent in many forms, but also experimental, aging, and Black) functions on stage, within the downtown scene here in NYC. While I consider myself lucky to have worked with a wide range of incredible artists, I wondered how others perceived my dancing. As technical? Experimental? As Black? I realized I needed to start creating my own work to propose ideas and challenge my audience to seek the answer with me and to examine how my body operates as a performing artist.
How long have you been building this work and why?
The pandemic was a very strange time. I was fortunate to be safe, healthy, and to have a lot of extra time. Somehow, with the whole performing arts industry shut down, I had room to be risky and fail in the privacy of my living room. I was reading a lot. I was looking at artists I admire like David Hammons, Arthur Jafa, and Carrie Mae Weems. I was writing a lot, with Steffani Jemison and Quincy Flowers’ online group, and playing with video editing. I followed the playwriting course offered by Young Jean Lee on Vimeo. By the time studios reopened, I had pages of text and silly video experiments that I selected and spread out to see what I was really trying to say. But it really came together when I got in the studio with my collaborators. I’m so grateful for them.
As an independent artist (and my mother’s daughter), I am always convinced I can go in alone. But working with my co-director Sean Donovan and co-producer Jenn Castro Song taught me to trust in collaboration. They see what I can’t, highlight my reserved tendencies, and push me to go further. I trusted them to hold onto my “why” and gently nudged me toward sharing it. Only then was I able to enjoy the satisfaction of seeing my ideas fully realized. My “why,” specifically, is still very close to me, or it is many things. I hope people can glean from the show. I had an invitation from The Chocolate Factory Theater to present my work, but after postponing for years, we couldn’t find a time that worked within their season. So we split the production time between summer and the performance dates in the spring. So, really, a scheduling barrier resulted in me creating a short film, which we shot in tremendous heat in the summer. But it felt right to essentially create two productions to contain all of my ideas.
You’ve presented “For All Your Life” in NYC before. What makes this BAM debut presentation in Brooklyn different?
I’m a first-time performer and a longtime subscriber at BAM. I remember carefully selecting Next Wave shows out of the seasonal brochure when I’d saved enough to purchase a subscription as a younger dancer in the city. Some of those performances and certainly the experiences had a lasting effect on what theater and live performance could do. And I’ve performed in many places, but never BAM. I was a bit nervous about presenting the show in New York again. But the performance — staged as a seminar presentation — aims to reach as many people as possible with my sales pitch. You can’t get access to the deal without coming to a presentation, like a timeshare seminar. The more shows I can do, the more people can access my sales pitch. I wanted to build a suitcase version to truly be a traveling saleswoman with this show.
The description of “For All Your Life” notes: Cuyjet delivers a seminar that reveals how the insurance business is linked to the historical slave trade, how people grapple with the inevitability of death, and how monetary value is affixed to human life. Some trigger words here are/might be: slave trade, and monetary value being affixed to human life. What does it take to bring these difficult terms to the stage?
Humor! Humor provides a cognitive buffer that allows us to accept some of these triggers as less harmful or stressful. I think when wording or general themes are granted such power, there presents an opportunity to shift the narrative. This is at the crux of why I think performance/art is so important. It can help us talk about the thing without talking about it. Still, when crafting the script with Sean, I came in at the beginning with a goal to deliberately omit certain phrases and words, in an effort to promote the feeling of these words through the use of performance and choreography. Instead of talking about the ideas around Black death, how do we show it?
After so many years and so much research, what does it feel like to bring the work to BAM?
Bringing my work as a solo artist to BAM feels big, so we created a big production and will focus on the next stage. I also hope some younger dancer comes to BAM, sees this show, and feels inspired by BAM supporting Brooklyn artists in this Next Wave Festival. There is a long list of future iterations of this project and I’m happy to have BAM on board at this moment. But I like to say that this is a lifelong project that will last for all of my life too.
For more information visit https://www.bam.org/forallyourlife