Exhibit
Leslie Cuyjet
For All Your Life
Upcoming performances and presentations listed here ◼ stay tuned or be in touch to learn about a presentation ◼ near you.
For All Your Life ◼ is a performance event and social experiment that investigates the value of Black life and Black death ◼This project scrutinizes the mechanism of life insurance and how it commodifies life and death, through the prism of the underwriting process.
Centered around an ambitious seriocomical short film, For All Your Life is staged as a performance seminar which offers a primer on the life insurance industry and its direct connection to slavery; unpacking the ways in which human beings grapple with the inevitable prospect of death and, more importantly, the ways in which lives—especially those of people of color—are monetized.
The piece rewrites the performative narrative tradition, where performer acts in service for the spectator; inviting the audience to confront its own value systems as they relate to black life and black death while navigating questions of reality, authenticity, accountability, and monetary value.
Creation and performance by Leslie Cuyjet ◼ Dramaturgy and Co-Direction by Sean Donovan ◼ Set design by Neal Wilkinson ◼ Sound design by Max Ludlow ◼ Lighting Design by Amanda K. Ringger ◼ Film Direction by Daniele Sarti ◼ Co-direction and Tour Management by Brian Maschka ◼ Stage Management by Tess Dworman and Randi Rivera ◼ Co-produced by Jennifer Castro Song and Sweat Variant
For All Your Life presentations ◼ upcoming and archive
Walker Art Center
McGuire Theater
Minneapolis, MN
February 18 - 20, 2027
Archive
Previous exhibitions of this ongoing project
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The performance was shared for one night only within this iconic and historic summer dance festival, but also served as the thematic rubric for the juried Flatlands Dance Film Festival. Films that centered on autobiography, time, comedy, and social systems were selected and screened during the festival.
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Three performances at MCA offered a homecoming for Leslie—a daughter of South Siders—and a new perspective on meta narratives. Newcity Stage shares a preview.
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Performances included in the 2025 Next Wave Festival, punctuated by being named the Best Dance Performances of 2025 by the NYTimes.
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More information, including an interview with Leslie, here.
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Presentations exhibited in the Studio Theater at Krannert Center for Performing Arts in Urbana, IL. More info here.
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For All Your Life remounts at CPR - Center for Performance Research as part of New York Live Arts’ Live Artery Festival 2025◼ Read the NY Times review.
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For All Your Life’s world premiere at The Chocolate Factory Theater ◼ April 2024. Read the review in Dance Enthusiast.
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Survival For All Your Life ◼A solo performance for E-Moves Festival at Harlem Stage, featuring “Dee,” a power blazer-toting insurance saleswoman whose own performance is that of a legible black woman in white spaces.
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For All Your Life ◼ A pair of essays published in MN Artists, Walker Museum, musing on an ancestor’s freedom to move across the oceans as a sailor and an aural meditation on being in water.
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For All Your Life Studies ◼ A two-channel video installation, included in SculptureCenter’s In Practice exhibition. The projections manipulate personal home videos to address a thorny relationship to the artist’s past; one that includes expressions of privilege, access, leisure, as well as survival. Curated by Katherine Reynolds.