Leslie Cuyjet: Blur
Saturday, August 29, 2026, 8:30pm
Sunday, August 30, 2026, 2:30pm - ASL Interpretation Provided
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Blur (West Coast Premiere), a solo performance by choreographer Leslie Cuyjet, experiments with visibility and invisibility, and the relationship between performer, audience, and object. Viewers are invited to navigate a choreographic and phonetic landscape through the lens of race and objectification. Written and performed by Cuyjet, Brandon Wolcott’s sound design manipulates text informed by personal history and experiences with dance, which so often casts her as a black dot on a white stage. A body suit composed of close-up images of Cuyjet’s own skin, designed by Miodrag Guberinic, helps Cuyjet ask if she can control her own erasure or disappearance and rewrite an existence she’s never experienced.
I am thrilled to have Leslie and the West Coast premiere of Blur at State of Play. Leslie's work challenges us to address perspective - particularly how identity, history, and lived experience shape the stories we tell and the stories that are told about us.
Zaquia Mahler Salinas
Resident Curator, ODC Theater
Leslie Cuyjet is a choreographer, dancer, and writer whose multidisciplinary practice weaves together dance, video, text, and installation. Her work functions as a living archive, tracing both personal and collective memory. Born breech in Illinois, the family story goes that she "came into this world dancing," feet first and kicking. After arriving in New York in 2004, Cuyjet spent years as a performer for a diverse group of downtown choreographers and artists, including Cynthia Oliver, Jane Comfort, David Gordon, Niall Jones, Juliana F. May, Narcissister, and Will Rawls. Her choreographic voice is driven by interrogating these experiences as a performer through the lens of the black body, and questions how the performer is perceived, staged, and remembered. Cuyjet's solo performances and installations present these intersections of history, personal narrative, and the politics of presence as pathways to visibility and black embodiment. Her work has been presented at venues like BAM, ICA Boston, EMPAC, The Kitchen, The Shed, MoMA PS1, Center for Performance Research, SculptureCenter, and The Chocolate Factory Theater.
Cuyjet has garnered recognition and support with a Guggenheim Fellowship, Princeton’s Hodder Fellowship, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants for Artists; with residency support from Sarah Michelson at David Zwirner, Performance Space New York, MacDowell, Chinati Foundation, Watermill Center, and Movement Research. She is also the recipient of two New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Awards. Cuyjet is a graduate of the inaugural cohort of the Goldman Sachs One Million Black Women: Black in Business program; and proudly served as co-editor for the online journal Critical Correspondence for two years. She received a B.F.A. in Dance from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She currently resides in Brooklyn, NY.
@el_cuyjet
This work was originally commissioned for Open Call at The Shed.
Program Credits
Created and Performed by Leslie Cuyjet
Costume Design, Miodrag Guberinic
Sound Design, Brandon Wolcott
Lighting Design Consulting, Sarai Frazier
Company and Stage Management, Brian Maschka
