Artists Reach Out: Leslie Cuyjet

Dear friends,

Welcome to Artists Reach Out: reflections in a time of isolation. I dreamed this series of interviews out of grief for my work both as a documenting arts writer and curator of live performance. In this time of social distancing, we are called to responsibly do all we can to safeguard ourselves and our neighbors. It is, literally, a matter of life and death.

But there's no distancing around what we still can share with one another--our experiences, thoughts, wisdom, humor, hearts and spirit. In some ways, there are more opportunities to do so as we pull back from everyday busyness out in the world and have time to honor the call of our inner lives.

So, let me introduce you to some artists I find interesting. I'm glad they're part of our beautiful community, and I'm eager to engage with them again (or for the first time) in years to come.

--Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

Leslie Cuyjet

Leslie Cuyjet
(photos: above, Maria Baranova;
below: Sara Fox)

Leslie Cuyjet is most known as a performer whose body of work was recognized with a 2019 New York Dance and Performance "Bessie" Award for Outstanding Performer for sustained achievement. She has collaborated, co-directed, designed, danced, and collaborated with a range of artists that include Will Rawls, Juliana F. May, Cynthia Oliver, Jane Comfort, David Gordon, NARCISSISTER, Kim Brandt, and Yanira Castro/a canary torsi among others. Her work interrogates those experiences as a performer in various experimental and post-modern works through the lens of a Black body; and has been supported by residencies at Movement Research, Center for Performance Research, Yaddo, Marble House Project, and MacDowell Colony. Cuyjet’s dances have been presented at MoMA PS1, Center for Performance Research, La MaMa Moves! Festival, Gibney Double Plus, Movement Research Fall Festival and Judson Church, and Danspace Draftworks. Her recent evening-length solo, Talented, at Center for Performance Research received a Last-Stage Production Stipend from the Mertz-Gilmore Foundation. She is co-editor of the Movement Research online publication, Critical Correspondence.

Leslie Cuyjet
(photo: Maria Baranova)

Do you have a current or planned project whose progress is affected by the pandemic?

Yes. I had a couple of shared performances of my work that have been cancelled. Performing is always a part of the process for me, to get eyes on it and be present in the dance. I was very excited to be a part of this year’s Dance and Process program at The Kitchen. I had been looking forward to it all year, and we had only briefly begun when the non-essential order was put in place and The Kitchen, along with everything else, closed. I wanted to challenge myself to make a new work in the 10-week process to really pay attention to how to start a dance, how to begin. What is really inside of me? This, I suppose, is always at the heart of my work. After dancing for so many different artists over the years, I really have to listen hard to find my own desires, my own voice. My plan was to take a deeper dive in this new work at the MacDowell Colony where I was headed the day after The Kitchen performances.

Briefly, tell me about how you got involved in the arts and in your particular practice.

I’ve been concerned with in/visibility for some time. I started to make my own work around the same time I began interrogating how I was being seen as a Black body in experimental and post-modern dance through their (mostly-white) audiences. When I moved to New York fifteen years ago, I danced for anyone I could work with. As a performer in someone else’s work, I learned how and when to have a collaborative voice in the room as well as when to be a body without a voice--although, funny enough, I worked with choreographers who were working with text, almost exclusively. I wasn't convinced the people I was dancing for considered how I, often the only Black dancer, was viewed in their work. I think the driving force in my practice is to consider how this body, one that is aging, angsty, and Black, can be seen for all that it is and everything I have become.

In a more specific way, what are you practicing? And what are you envisioning?

Initially, I didn’t set out to make solo work, but my process tends to start in a studio by myself, interrogating issues about my role in the field, this community, and society at large. Working alone where I am at the forefront of my questioning allows concerns to rise and fall away or resolve themselves without judgement. Sensitivity is a virtue I bring into other people’s processes, and I use it freely in order to eke out undermined, unspoken, and unformed ideas in their studios. I am learning how to slow down and apply that same listening by evaluating what exactly I’m compelled to do. And now that this slowing down has been forced into a sudden halt, I am resisting the urge to move just to keep going. I’m trying to hold my ground until I’m compelled to move. And I mean that physically yes, but also creatively. This act of stillness is bringing up a lot of questions that center around form. Or more simply what am I making and how do I wish for it to be experienced? Where will I go from here? Is it even dance? (It is always dance.)

How does your practice and your visioning align with what you most care about?

I’m thinking a lot about nostalgia. A lot of my work focuses on memory, transience, past lives and projected future selves. Remembering is powerful. I’m fascinated how nostalgia can isolate a moment or event in the past and conjure up very intense and very real emotions in the present. What we once knew in terms of how we make, perform, gather is gone, at least for a long time. And later, we’ll refer to this time relatively as a “before” and “after” quarantine.

I’m trying really hard to stay still. To resist the notion that I need to adapt, move, change, and reapply my practice to this new format where everything is online. I think it will be a long time until we’re in rooms together again. Being with people is what I built, not only my practice but my career off of. Now that it might be a long time until we can engage that way, I have to reconsider what I do and how it fits into this new model.

We have to embrace this shift, this change, what’s happening right now because nostalgia can be distracting and, in turn, dangerous.

How does your practice function within the world we have now?

I wake up every day and create a life to live. Just like always. I never had a strict routine, so I’m not trying to stick to one thing. I am embracing the slowness of time and have really been enjoying slow cooking like soaking and sprouting beans, letting dough rise for bread baking, and fermenting vegetables. Some days, I need to clean my apartment again and again. Others I have to physically and mentally prepare myself to face the stressful act of grocery shopping. And then some days, like right now, I can write.

I am looking for new ways to document this time so we don’t miss it. As we move forward we’ll look to the past as a point to move toward or away from. I don’t know how to name this time, this practice, this world. But if I keep finding ways to catalog and document the present I’ll soon have a collection of material for the future.

Briefly share one self-care tip that has special meaning to you now.

Sleep. I’m sleeping long and late and letting my dreams run wild. This is where I have convinced myself, though my creative practice might be at bay, that my creativity is intensely alive.

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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Doubling up: Leslie Cuyjet and Lela Aisha Jones at Gibney

Patricia Peaches Jones
in Plight Release & the Diasporic Body: Jesus & Egun
(photo: Scott Shaw)

Choreographers create worlds for us to visit--visits sometimes good enough to make us to want to linger. But I don't recall ever wanting to just go live there. I mean permanently. Then came Lela Aisha Jones.

Jones--curated by Cynthia Oliver for a DoublePlus evening at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center--created a world so finely-crafted and nourishing that I could imagine not ever leaving. Really, this dance might be all I need for the rest of my life.

Her trio, Plight Release & the Diasporic Body: Jesus & Egun, takes off from the notion that Jesus, a figure dear to many people of African descent, is also way overworked. There are so many other ancestors and spiritual beings who could and should be asked to shoulder some of that burden. This is a concept Jones attributes to Nzinga Metzger, PhD, a scholar of African diasporic religious traditions.

Wow. Rather than rejecting Jesus as the ironically white icon of European colonizers, Jones both embraces and frees him. She doesn't so much lower him from his pedestal in Black church tradition as place him on a spectrum with others. And with her wonderful dancing mates--Zakiya L. Cornish and Patricia Peaches Jones--she demonstrates that Afro-Atlantic religious traditions, including those under the banner of Christianity, can exist to serve the nature and cultures and healing needs of the people who take part in them.

L-r: Patricia Peaches Jones, Zakiya L. Cornish and Lela Aisha Jones
(photo: Scott Shaw)

Everything in Plight Release is made or selected by Jones and her team with utmost care--set and props (which we encounter and interact with first), lighting and shadows, costuming, music and, finally, dancing of ritualistic rigor and beauty. There's nothing done by rote or imitation. Jones finds her own ways to employ symbols, gestures, dance steps. The effect is to be welcomed into a gracious home and sacred space, treated with respect and, at every moment, feel yourself to be in the presence of someone with clarity about what she's doing and why she's doing it. You simply relax.

So, it's decided. I need to look for more from Lela Aisha Jones | FlyGround, and you need to go see this piece tonight. Last chance!

Also curated by Oliver for this program: Alike, an intriguing duet by Leslie Cuyjet for herself and Darrin Wright. The big draw here is seeing two of New York's "dancers' dancers" explore magical, even mysterious approaches to space and their more obvious differences of gender, race, timing and expression.

Darren Wright and Leslie Cuyjet in Alike
(photo: Scott Shaw)

This DoublePlus program concludes with tonight's performance at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

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This week, Cynthia Oliver goes BOOM!

R-l: Leslie Cuyjet and Cynthia Oliver in Boom!
(photos by Julieta Cervantes)

Acclaimed dancer, choreographer and educator Cynthia Oliver presents the world premiere of Boom!--a duet with Leslie Cuyjet--at New York Live Arts this Thursday evening. Yesterday, she put up with some of my "really provocative questions," as she called them.

EYA: Who are you? What elements make up who you are as a dancemaker?

CO: That's a question I've been asking myself since I was a teenager. For many years, I worked hard to think about it outside of what I do. In some ways, I am what I do in terms of how I move in the world. But first: a person, a woman, a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister, a friend, an artist. Not that the order of it shows any priority, but it's a humble mix.

EYA: What do you most value? What do you find non-negotiable?

CO: Being honest with myself, my relationships--my family, my friends--and being human and humane. Those guideposts in my work have never, ever led me wrong. They helped me steer the course of each piece clearly.

EYA: What challenges you?

CO: Fear. I feel like I push through fear every day. It's there. I acknowledge it. But I know that I'm not going to accomplish anything by buckling to it. I have to do what it is that's inspiring me anyway, and once I get on the other side of it, it's like a whole other world opens up.

I feel like fear has always been my biggest challenge. I'm not a very outward person, although I love people. I have some wonderful friends and enjoy social situations, but my husband is the real social butterfly. I am not at all. I push through that and see what happens. I feel that I have done okay with that.

EYA: Through what perceptual channels do you best perceive things?

CO: I think of my intuition as my strongest perceptual channel. I've learned how to trust it, listen to it and act on it. Because when I don't, I pay. I remember early on in my tenure [at University of Illinois], I created a piece with a large gospel group with the Black Chorus out there. I had never worked with more than five people in a piece. This was a chorus of forty-five. I was choreographing them and eight dancers.

The piece was called Whisper to Shout, and it addressed this very thing: I had started to realize that if I don't listen to the whisper, the shout was going to be a humdinger. The shout was going to kick my behind. So I had to attune my ear to the whisper and be much more sensitive and much more aware of the whisper. And that's just a matter of trust and not saying, Oh, no, I couldn't possibly be right with that feeling that I should act on. That's my strongest perceptual channel.

EYA: What audience would you most like to reach?

Honestly, I just want humans there. On so many different levels, I feel that the work can speak to a lot of different people. On the obvious level, yes, women audiences, Caribbean audiences, people of color. But at the same time, all of the concerns that I address--those that are both obvious and blatant and those that are layered and more subtle--are universal concerns that we all, as humans, negotiate. I want as many kinds of folks in the room as possible sitting right next to each other.

I think my audience is a reflection of my own life. I have always had a very diverse group of people around me. I grew up in an international community in St. Croix, US Virgin Islands. When I moved to the states to be a professional dancer, that is something I continued. When I went to college, I found that the African American community in the states tended to be more segregated than where I came from. Not that there is not segregation there. But it's one of those things where you'd still see a lot of mixing, especially in those heady days of the '70s, when I was in high school. Less so now. It's much more polarized now [due to economic disparity, changes wrought by disasters such as Hurricane Hugo and other factors.] But at that time, it was very different. That's how I got exposed to a certain kind of experimental dance there, that breadth of experience across communities.

EYA: Do you need an outside eye on your work? Or are you able to be objective about what you do?

CO: I do both. I trust my own eye and my own sensibilities about what needs to happen--what kinds of sequence, what kinds of material, what kinds of language. And because I do a lot of research in the work, I trust that. I also strongly believe that none of us can be objective, and it helps to have a trusted eye in the room. The key word there is trusted. I make sure that the person I ask to come and watch, while the work is in that delicate state, is someone who can put aside their own aesthetic, their own agenda, and look at what I'm trying to do and ask me questions that will help me clarify what I'm trying to do, not what they want. I find that that combination--knowing when to bring people in, going back and revising, and then bringing folks in again--that's been really helpful to me.

EYA: What do you consider to be the most important qualities of a serious or professional artist?

CO: Openness. Sensitivity. A willingness to see beyond where you are and what your work is, to see the broader relationship to your field, to the world, to folks around you. Mostly, openness.

EYA: Why is dance your focus?

CO: The full embodiment. I actually didn't start out as a dancer. My sisters danced and, I think since I was the last of six kids, my parents just said, Go on with your sisters!, to get me out of the house.

I was a visual artist. My parents let me try a lot of things. I tried music. I was terrible at music. But painting, drawing, was my arena. I thought I'd make my living as an architect. I took courses in physics and calculus in high school thinking I was going to go in that direction. Dance was really a hobby early on.

And then I had this mentor who fell in love with me and I with her. She was from Kurt Jooss [the German choreographer] and had been in the Caribbean for decades and had a dance school. I would go there and study Afro-Caribbean dance during the week, and she invited me to start taking ballet and improvisation with her. Then she kept putting me onstage, and she encouraged me to move in this direction. And I loved it! I loved the physicality of dance. I'm a swimmer. So, moving on land was really nice too! She would bring dance companies to the island to expose young people to these companies. So, I saw George Faison's Universal Dance Experience; that really blew my mind. I saw a lot of different companies from Europe, South America, the Caribbean.

Recruiters came at the end of high school, and I thought, I really should do this! This feels like something I could really sink my teeth into. A big concern for my dad was, "How're you going to afford to live?" My mom--a brilliant artist and a seamstress--was different. She was like, "Take your wings and fly, girl. Do that art."

See the world premiere of Cynthia Oliver's BOOM! 

at New York Live Arts, Oct 23-25. 

Click here for details and tickets.

Related events:

October 23 at 6:30pm: Come Early Conversation: Sequencing Non-Linear Narratives, choreographer and educator Nia Love discusses the creative practice of Cynthia Oliver

October 24: Stay Late Discussion: Her History - Her Present - Her Future, Cynthia Oliver and Leslie Cuyjet in conversation with Jaamil Olawale Kosoko

Cynthia Oliver’s work is the visceral evidence of an incongruous mixture of aesthetics. Steeped in the everyday sounds of black voices and bodies moving in time and space in the Caribbean of her youth, Ms. Oliver was encouraged to explore ballet, dance dramas and site specific improvisational experiments led by Atti van den Berg - a former Kurt Jooss dance drama company member/performer. All the while she absorbed both the informal and formal of the Afro-Caribbean dance canons in the US Virgin Islands and elsewhere in the region. These vastly differing experiences defined her childhood coming into art. Moving in this way led her to an eclectic career in New York City and abroad in the world of performance art and experimental dancing with folks as diverse as The Caribbean Dance Company, Theatre Dance Inc., the David Gordon/Pick Up Company, Ronald Kevin Brown/EVIDENCE and Bebe Miller. She currently performs in Tere O’Connor’s Sister and BLEED dance works. Oliver has studied and been a part of the black avant garde theatre world, performing in the works of numerous playwrights, most notably, Laurie Carlos’ White Chocolate for my Father, and Vanquished by Voodoo, and Ntozake Shange’s A Photograph Lover’s In Motion, also directed by Ms. Carlos; Greg Tate’s My Darling Gremlin; and choreographing for theatrical productions like The University of Illinois’ theatre company production of George C. Wolff’s Colored Museum directed by Lisa Gaye Dixon. Her choreography for theater has been performed at Minnesota’s Penumbra and Pillsbury House Theaters, New York’s La MaMa Etc., Syncronicity Space and Aaron Davis Hall.

Oliver has been creating dance works since 1991. A mélange of dance, theatre and the spoken word, her pieces reflect her background and interests, incorporating the textures of Caribbean performance with African and American sensibilities. Named “Outstanding Young Choreographer” by reviewer Frank Werner in German Magazine Ballet Tanz early in her career, Oliver has since received numerous grants and awards including most notably, a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award, two Illinois Arts Council Choreography Fellowships, a Creative Capital award, a Rockefeller Multi-Arts Production grant, NEFA Touring support, NPN Creation Funds, a CalArts Alpert Award nomination and a prestigious University Scholar Award from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she is a Professor of dance. In addition to her performance credits, Oliver holds a PhD in performance studies from New York University. She has published widely and is the author of Queen of the Virgins: Pageantry and Black Womanhood in the Caribbean (University Press of Mississippi. 2009).

Souleymane Badolo and Cynthia Oliver at New York Live Arts

I've always found that I like the encounter with a new or a developing dance to surprise me. I'm neither a prospective presenter nor a funder nor even a prospective ticket-buyer with an unsparing budget. I don't write for the paper of record. Basically, I can go and have fun at these things. So I don't require having things spelled out to me. All of that can be interesting but confounding, too, when you find yourself searching high and low for the specific things you read about. Which is not to say that what you read about isn't there, somewhere, but that sometimes the advance warning gets in the way of live experience, introducing a sense of passive expectation or distracting anticipation. Maybe not knowing is, in the long run, the better path to knowing.

Cynthia Oliver (left) and Leslie Cuyjet in BOOM! (photo by Ian Douglas)

Souleymane Badolo in Buudou, BADOO, BADOLO (photo by Ian Douglas)

This is by way of saying that I'm not sure that I saw the Boom! duet, a seed work choreographed, written and directed by Cynthia Oliver for herself and Leslie Cuyjet, as advertised: "negotiating and renegotiating the rules of personhood, fate and consequence...." and "simultaneously reveals, resists and submits to the structures and shape of a performance."

The fault might be entirely my own, I will admit. But I will also admit to being captivated from the moment I heard an upstairs door bang and the darkened theater's left aisle fill with the bubbling voices of two women as half-bright blotches (the near-invisible dancers wearing over-sized white shirts) descended through the dark towards New York Live Arts' bare space. Once in place, side by side, the women took up that space--expansive in action, splayed off-kilter, owning the land and air rights and, when grounded, gazing sideways like don't-mess-with lions at rest. Hereafter, Oliver and Cuyjet will be "Tried Patience" and "Unwavering Fortitude."

In motion, their confident gestures and phrases seemed like some kind of Black diasporan Tai Chi--an enigmatic but resonant long form I longed to learn. The genius and appeal of these two dancers grew from their musicality and sure-of-themselves radiance. And the surprise--for anyone who had not seen the previous version of Boom! offered during Danspace Project's great Parallels series--came from the fierce spoken word conclusion of the duet which, I think, intended to uncover who these two entities might be. They might remind each of us, in unique ways, of specific people or types or even groups. Who in your life has the power to raise you up at one moment and strike you down in the next? You should leave Boom! feeling a little shaken, a little stirred, even if you're not immediately sure why.

The English equivalent for the Gurunsi word barack is, roughly, "gratitude." With Barack, dancer-choreographer Souleymane Badolo pays tribute to those who helped him along the path from dance training in his native Burkina Faso to celebrity on the US contemporary dance scene. Edith Piaf's "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" is such a strong, recurring color on the dancemaker's florid palette for this solo--a work that displays external and internal struggle--that we can't help but imagine that that passage has been marked by profound difficulty. Nothing regretted, though, neither the bad nor the good. But perhaps we're not looking at "Solo" (this dancer's nickname) so much as glimpsing an embodiment of African experience, a capacious grail within the capacious memory palace of the human body--in this case, a body with massive, heavy wings that unfurl awkwardly as its feet struggle against slippery or unstable ground. An eagle touched down on a river-washed, floating log. Or on smoldering ash. Badolo is some kind of eagle, though. He keeps a wonderful balance. It's like a game with delicate calibrations of the shift of weight for functional as well as visual effect and an outburst of puckish joy to the music of the Congolese singer-musician Tabu Ley Rochere.

I wish I could attend Badolo's Shared Practice event tomorrow afternoon at New York Live Arts but--in a breathtaking example of synchronicity--I, too, will be sharing and teaching a form of divination at the same time. Mine is called Tarot, but Solo's, from his Gurunsi heritage, is called bagger. This practice divines by interpreting thrown cowrie shells, and Badolo uses it to build the structure of his dances. (To understand this, think Cage/Cunningham/I Ching--but just for a moment.) In his impressive new solo, Buudou, BADOO, BADOLO, he uses the operations of bagger to invoke not just any hazy future but, rather, the powerful through-line connecting him to his male ancestors in the long-ago and to his son in the rich, multidimensional present.

Souleymane Badolo and Cynthia Oliver's shared program continues this evening and tomorrow with performances at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

New York Live Arts
219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)