Leslie Cuyjet: Blur
Saturday, August 29, 2026, 8:30pm
Sunday, August 30, 2026, 2:30pm - ASL Interpretation Provided
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.
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.
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ODC Theater exists to empower and develop innovative artists. It participates in the creation of new works through commissioning, presenting, mentorship and space access; it develops informed, engaged and committed audiences; and advocates for the performing arts as an essential component to the economic and cultural development of our community. This 170-seat venue is the site of over 150 performances a year involving nearly 1,000 local, regional, national and international artists.
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