On View: November 30-December 4
The Kitchen at Westbeth (163B Bank Street, Fourth Floor Loft)
Time:
7:00 pm, Tickets forthcoming
In this new evening-length work, choreographer Leslie Cuyjet mines family archives and narratives to refract her own notion of selfhood. 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. The origins of this work began in The Kitchen's Dance and Process program over the course of 2020-2021, with monthly writings published on The Kitchen's website and an in-process showing in May 2021.
Leslie Cuyjet: With Marion is organized by Matthew Lyons, Curator, with Angelique Rosales Salgado, Curatorial Assistant.
BIOS
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).
FUNDING SUPPORT & CREDITS
The Kitchen’s programs are made possible through generous support from annual grants from Bloomberg Philanthropies, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Mertz Gilmore Foundation, Simons Foundation, Ruth Foundation for the Arts, and Teiger Foundation; and in part by public funds from New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
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