Leslie Cuyjet. Photo © Paula Court.

The Technical Residency is closed to the public.


Leslie Cuyjet is CPR’s Fall 2023 Technical Resident. The residency will support final stages of production design and rehearsal for Cuyjet's new evening-length work, With Marion, which will premiere at The Kitchen in late November 2023. For one uninterrupted week, Cuyjet will work in CPR’s Large Studio with access to a robust inventory of a/v equipment and support from CPR production staff.

With Marion is built from memories of and research about Cuyjet's great aunt Marion Cuyjet, a pioneer of dance education for students of color in the 1950s. In a densely mediated performance environment, Cuyjet builds video loops in real time combining archival footage with her own pre-recorded and live-captured video. Questioning the proximity of objects and self, Cuyjet assembles a fragmented, unstable repository of the past in order to redirect a future out from under its thumb.


Leslie Cuyjet is an award-winning choreographer and performer whose work aims to conjure life-long questions of identity, confuse and disrupt traditional narratives, and demonstrate the angsty, explosive, sensitive, pioneering excellence of the Black woman. Since 2004, her tenure in the New York dance world is decorated with performances and collaborations, both formal and informal; with contemporaries, legends, and counterparts; on rooftops, good and bad floors, and alleyways; on stage, in film, art, on tour, and on the fly. “A strong, subtle presence unassumingly ground the stage,” says The New York Times. Recent honors include Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants for Artists (Dance), Princeton Hodder Fellowship, and an Outstanding Choreographer/Creator “Bessie” Award for her 2021 work, Blur. Cuyjet was a Dance and Process participant at The Kitchen (2020-2021).

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