'With Marion' a sideway facing of ballet's racist past

Leslie Cuyjet's "With Marion" as seen at The Kitchen in 2023. (Photo by Walter Wlodarczyk)

 Things for Leslie Cuyjet did not run smoothly last night.
 
The soloist and dancer who performed her ode to her great aunt at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer on Friday night had technical difficulties with the sound cutting in and out – enough so that the performance of “With Marion” halted deep inside the program and then restarted. And even then, the sound didn’t cooperate.  But Leslie Cuyjet continued, encouraging those who observed her, up close in one of the center’s small theaters, “to use their imagination.”
 
Indeed, we did as Leslie Cuyjet provided the audience with enough material to tickle the senses – transporting the watchers into a world of dance that not only judges ones technical abilities, but also the color of one’s skin.
 
To understand what Leslie Cuyjet’s quest to see and be “With Marion,” it helps to know a little bit of background. Marion Cuyjet was a light-skinned Black dancer in Philadelphia who established her own influential school for Black dancers after being tossed out of the city most prestigious white classical ballet school for, incredibly, not being white.
 
Leslie Cuyjet teased the audience to join her in reeling back to the past with a montage of words, movement and imagery performed in and around a three-sided box. Its exterior walls projected the images of a white plate supporting items that symbolize racism: a rope, a knife and a crushed brown paper bag, that was once used to calibrate the hue of one’s skin. She also has a photo of Marion Cuyjet that, in video, she positioned and repositioned as if trying to imagine where Marion Cuyjet could fit.
 
Dressed in Blundstone boots and a colorful body shirt and slacks adorned with geometric patterns, Leslie Cuyjet released her memories with videos of 1950s Black cotillions, raging waters and the shuffling and reshuffling of decorative papers from her studio. Along with the elegance of the debutante ball, she juxtaposed videos of roiling rivers and the shuffling and reshuffling of the papers – as if to question what to show, what to hide in tumultuous waters.
 
A voiceover talks about looking like a swimmer, but not being one, and dance “practice” where she was placed in the back of the room and wondered why. Throughout, she boureed or twirled or dived. At one point, she leaves her box and bowed again and again and again as if seeking applause that never came. And then returning to the box, she performed a raging, head-banging dance that she ended with her seated on a chair saying what she doesn’t have.
 
"With Marion" ended with Nina Simone’s singing “I Ain’t Got No, I Got Life,” a song that affirms humanity.
 
Side from the audio glitch, the power of the piece was also marred by the placement of the box within the theater. Most viewed it from the back end – missing the clarity of the video projections. It was like watching a performance from backstage without the benefit of the knowing its full effect.
 
Regardless, Leslie Cuyjet’s connections to the past, couched in metaphor, was clearly strong, emotional and poetic.