FOR ALL YOUR LIFE Comes to the Chocolate Factory Theatre

The Chocolate Factory Theater will continue its Spring 2024 season with the premiere of For All Your Life, a new dance performance and film by Leslie Cuyjet. Tickets may be purchased in advance at chocolatefactorytheater.org.

For All Your Life is a performance event, film, and social experiment that investigates the value of Black life and Black death; scrutinizing the mechanism of life insurance through the prism of the underwriting process. 

Centered around an ambitious seriocomical short film (produced at The Chocolate Factory Theater in Summer 2023, directed by Daniele Sarti), For All Your Life is staged as a performance seminar - with accompanying audiovisual aids - in which Cuyjet 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. 

For All Your Life aims to rewrite the performative narrative tradition (in which performance is an act of 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.

An accompanying website (forallyourlife.com) will serve as both an online archive of the project and a literal marketplace - extending the life of the project beyond the dates of its physical performance, “for all your life”.

“I began my research in the summer of 2020, when the awareness of black lives mattering complicated my sense of place, deservedness, and privilege as black, a woman, and an artist. My previous investigations into class, privilege, art, and history fueled my earlier work and chronicled the awesome and awkward experience of slipping through the cracks: Black but not “Black” black, artist but not the Artist.”

“And in that moment in 2020, as the lens was pointed so directly and unabashedly towards black people, as leadership positions and cohorts were swiftly replaced entirely with people of color in the wake of the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, I was left with a greater complication as my blackness was alleviated of the nuance I had worked so hard to uncover. This project frames an intersection between past and present, personal and cultural, and is rife with contradictions. It imitates the sensation of my life navigating through liminal realities: black in white spaces, between success and fear, descendent of slaves and salesperson; to implicate and require its audiences to share this labor.”

For All Your Life is created and performed by Leslie Cuyjet. Dramaturgy and Co-Direction by Sean Donovan. Set design by Neal Wilkinson. Lighting Design by Amanda K. Ringger. Film Direction: Daniele Sarti. Co-produced by Jennifer Castro Song and Sweat Variant.

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