Film still from Leslie Cuyjet: For All Your Life (2024). Video by Peter Richards. Courtesy the artist.
General Admission: $25
Presenter Tickets: $15
Purchase Tickets
Saturday, January 11 at 6:30PM
Sunday, January 12 at 1PM & 5PM
Part film, part live performance, part social experiment, For All Your Life challenges audiences to meditate on the value of black life and black death. Specifically the value of the life, work, and death of choreographer and artist Leslie Cuyjet. The performance itself is a “sales pitch,” one that culminates in a call to action: to invest in Cuyjet, by buying into her life insurance policy. (“What has more value than ‘saying her name’ when she’s dead? Investing in her life, today!”) The audience receives an opportunity to offer support, with real money, and “own” a piece of black life. An opportunity they can reckon with, invest in, or ignore.
This work rewrites a performative narrative tradition where artist serves the audience. Instead, Cuyjet’s pitch asks viewers to navigate the value of black life versus black death within their own sensibility, within what is real or fiction, authentic or snake oil, and decide if it is worth their money. The pitch, and its accompanying video presentation, teaches us about life insurance and its direct connection to slavery, highlights the way we respond to death, and provokes reflection on how we regard life, especially the lives of people of color.
The seed for this work began after discovering that the insurance company, New York Life, once sold policies on the lives of slaves, and whose former tagline inspired this title. For All Your Life by design will last for all of Cuyjet’s life. A website (forallyourlife.com) serves both as an online archive of the life of the project, as well as a marketplace; a financial instrument where people can invest, allowing this project to exist beyond the performance, and “for all your life” too.
CREDITS
Created and performed by Leslie Cuyjet
Co-director and Dramaturgy: Sean Donovan
Stage Management: Randi Rivera
Stage Design: Neal Wilkinson
Lighting design: Amanda K. Ringger
Video and sound design: Max Ludlow
Co-producers: Jennifer Castro Song and Sweat Variant
Film Credits
Director: Daniele Sarti
Assistant Camera: Max Nemhauser and Joe Kickbush
Audio: Will Scott
Assistant Set Design: Joseph Wolfslau
Make up: Jane Serenska
Production Management: Tess Dworman
Editing: Daniele Sarti, Leslie Cuyjet, and Tim Donovan
Sound Mix: dayae choi
Additional Performers: Tess Dworman, Jacque Betesh, Katrina Reed, and Jason Watt
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Leslie Cuyjet is a performer, artist and “a potent choreographic voice,” says the New York Times. For two decades, she has danced for and collaborated with a range of artists like David Gordon, Juliana F. May, Will Rawls, Cynthia Oliver, Jane Comfort, Tere O’Connor, Niall Jones, Yanira Castro and many others. Cuyjet’s own work interrogates these experiences as a performer through the lens of the black body, and includes movement, film, text, and theater. Her work has been presented at The Kitchen, MoMA PS1, The Chocolate Factory, CPR – Center for Performance Research, SculptureCenter, Gibney, and The Shed; where her piece, Blur, garnered her second “Bessie” Award for Outstanding Choreographer/Creator in 2022. Recent honors include Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants for Artists, Princeton Hodder Fellow, Movement Research Resident Artist, and MacDowell Fellow. Cuyjet has been supported by residencies at Movement Research, CPR – Center for Performance Research, Yaddo, Marble House Project, and New Dance Alliance. She is a published writer and the former co-editor of Critical Correspondence. Cuyjet graduated from the first cohort of Goldman Sachs One Million Black Women: Black in Business program and holds a B.F.A. in Dance from the University of Illinois.
Sean Donovan is an actor, director, choreographer, dancer, and writer. His recent works include, Cabin at The Bushwick Starr, The Reception at HERE Arts, and 18 1/2 Minutes at JACK (in collaboration with Sebastián Calderón Bentin). He’s also been presented in The Under the Radar Festival, CUNY’s Prelude Festival, Incubator Arts Project, FAE Festival in Panama, Stanford University, NYU, and others. Sean won a 2022 Lortel Award for his performance in Heather Christian’s Oratorio for Living Things at Ars Nova. He was nominated for 2014 and 2017 BESSIE awards for Outstanding Performer. He’s worked with Taylor Mac, Lee Sunday Evans, Heather Christian, Faye Driscoll, Miguel Gutierrez, Jane Comfort, The Builders Association, and many others. Recent credits include Bark of Millions at Sydney Opera House and BAM, The Trees at Playwrights Horizons, Oratorio for Living Things at Ars Nova, Thank You for Coming at BAM, Danspace Project and an international tour, Age & Beauty Part 2 at NYLA, and House/Divided at BAM. He co-wrote the web series Morning Chardonnay with Hannah Heller. Other Film/TV credits include Law and Order: Organized Crime, Feast of the Epiphany, and Laurence. He holds a BFA in Theatre from NYU. He teaches Movement and Choreography at NYU.
Max Ludlow is a British-American audio engineer, sound designer, and multimedia artist based in Brooklyn, New York. He can often be found building sound systems, troubleshooting projectors, and hanging large objects from the ceiling at venues such as The Kitchen, Harlem Stage, and The Chocolate Factory, among others. A graduate of Purchase College, SUNY, with a BA in Anthropology and Media Studies, Max produces the Artists and Hackers podcast and coordinates the Audio Storytelling program at the Tribeca Festival. In his free time, he performs electronic music under the alias Windy 500 and conducts research on avant-garde, punk, and electronic art.
Amanda K. Ringger has been designing locally, nationally, and internationally for over 20 years with artists such as Faye Driscoll, Cynthia Oliver, Doug Elkins, Leslie Cuyjet, Molly Poerstel, Ivy Baldwin, Laura Peterson, Darrah Carr, Antonio Ramos, Alexandra Beller, Sean Donovan, and cakeface, among many others. She received a BA from Goucher College in Baltimore, MD and an MFA from Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. She is the recipient of a Bessie award for her collaboration on Faye Driscoll’s 837 Venice Boulevard at HERE Arts Center.
Randi Rivera is a native New Yorker from the Bronx. She has been a freelance Stage Manager and Lighting Director since 2009, working both in NYC and on the road. A few favorite colleagues include Tina Satter & Half Straddle, Keigwin & Company, Dance Heginbotham, Harlem Stage, Faye Driscoll, Doug Elkins Choreography Etc, Sidra Bell Dance NY, The Chocolate Factory, Andrew Schneider, Ivy Baldwin, Cathy Weis, Gallim Dance, Sean Donovan, Phantom Limb Company, and Ballez. Rivera served as Associate Director for the Broadway run of Half Straddle’s Is This A Room in 2021. All of her work is for her family.
Neal Wilkinson is a set designer, production manager, and visual artist. His most recent set design was Hang Time by Zora Howard, which was premiered at the Flea last year. As a member of the Builders Association from 2003 to 2019, he designed works including House/Divided, Elements of OZ, and Strange Window, which have been presented by theater festivals internationally. Neal’s company Corps Liminis provides production management for theatrical productions, museums, and installations. Most recent projects include Here We Are, Sonic Sphere, and Tomas Saraceno’s Particular Matter(s) at the SHED, the 2022 Lightscape at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and the Joan Jonas retrospective at MoMA. As a multimedia artist, his new work Fight For America!, in which the events of January 6th, 2021 are re-played by audience members as a tabletop wargame, will be produced by The American Vicarious and premiere in 2025: [www.fightforamerica.games]
