THICK WAKE – Leslie Cuyjet

For Leslie Cuyjet’s Extended Life Residency, THICK WAKE reimagined images and text from previous works, White Noise (The Shed, 2022) and For All Your Life Studies (SculptureCenter, 2021), which were comprised of personal home videos of swimming competitions from her youth. Cuyjet had recast herself as the silhouetted swimmer seen from underneath (and shot with filmmaker Richard Martin), in a seemingly endless stroke.

Projections overhead had evoked a feeling of being submerged, while various video loops had merged and segregated. The video transitions, created and designed with video artist Matthew Deinhart, had been accompanied by text that drew on family and cultural history of access to swimming pools and privilege. While Cuyjet had imagined the full scope of the project and installation, THICK WAKE was still in progress.

Audio transcription is available here.

Run time: approximately 20 minutes.

Program Note
In the 1950s, film star and Oscar nominee Dorthy Dandridge dipped her toe in a pool after being told that facility in the hotel she was performing in was not available to her because she was Black. Due to the rebellion of her toe, the pool was emptied and refilled. I think about my own contamination, real and imagined. And about the alchemy of water and its relationship to the body; the transference that occurs when we are submerged and surrounded despite our consciousness of it. I imagined this image, a dark-bodied swimmer in a perpetual stroke viewed from underneath, for a long time. Not knowing exactly why other than “needing to,” I am grateful to LMCC and Black Gotham Experience for supplying the space and resources to find it. This installation (an ambition that is limited here to the technology of projection and video), is a marker on the map of a larger journey, demonstrates the current state of my process and reconsiders the past as presence: past dances, a collective history, the remnants after a disturbance... It folds former ideas into new iterations. I appreciate you stopping by to offer your eyes. If you are watching, then you too are contaminated. What to do in this wake?

Thank you to Matthew, Kamau, Shana and everyone at LMCC. Thank you Rich and Jessie.

Performer: Leslie Cuyjet
Video Design: Matthew Deinhart
Videographer: Richard Martin
Administration: Leslie Cuyjet, Inc.

Leslie Cuyjet is part of LMCC's Extended Life Dance Development Program supported, in part, by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Leslie Cuyjet was presented as part of the 2024 River to River Festival, with the support of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels.

THICK WAKE was supported by Black Gotham Experience.