With Marion
May 15-16, 2020
With Marion investigates the proximity of objects and self in a new performance work using projection and video. The origins of this work began with monthly musings, published on The Kitchen’s OnScreen website, on a photo composite of the same name, made from the objects on the artist’s desk. In real time, Cuyjet builds video loops and dances to assemble a fragmented archive of a fictional past to redirect a future out from under its thumb.
Accompanying this performance is a five-part written series that was published every month leading up to the performance. Audiences received a free copy of the publication for additional reading.
With Marion comprises materials kept at my newly formed and adolescent home studio. The virtual Dance and Process sessions took place at the same location and influenced a shift in format from dancing to writing, drawing, and video. Marion Cuyjet, my great aunt, was a pioneer of dance education for students of color in the 1950s. Her portrait sits on my desk. Next month, Objects.
“Ok, this dance is private. It forms new pathways to allow the unexpected to emerge. It is also a constant practice of letting them all disappear quietly into nothing...” - January 2020, The Kitchen On Screen
/ writing
/ all works
1 / Reorientation
Our first meeting under the fluorescent work lights of the black box theatre, we arrange stacked chairs in a circle like it is another kind of meeting, late on a Sunday past the elevated tracks on the west side of the city. These kinds of circles are a summoning driven by those who are its make up. Circles that are familiar and instinctual even outside of a church basement or assembly hall. Coats draped on the back of metal frames, steam rises from a thermos of tea, a snack opens, the tick tack of the pen cap hits the floor, nervous chatter. This imperfect orientation is a preparation, a confession. A cell phone with a timer set to 45 minutes is slid into the center of the circle. Your turn, go.
Ok, this dance is private. It forms new pathways to allow the unexpected to emerge. It is also a constant practice of letting them all disappear quietly into nothing. I say it out loud for the first time. Everyone’s attention is at once thrilling and menacing, like a hunk of rock teetering on the edge of a cliff. I am woefully unprepared for what falls out of my mouth and into my ears. Grasping at identifiers that say who I am, that prove I’m an artist deserving of being here. The lighting grid above us is black and silent as I squirm in the illusive spotlight. With each turn we create a loop that mimics my practice: show up, invest, interrogate, write, let go. Here we are, committing to these solos, speaking on our own behalf, intimately defending our work to a room of our peers. During his rant Kris explains, there’s “no solo in Blackness,” quoting Thomas DeFrantz. How hearing that fucked up his work in productive ways. Within this orientation I feel our social duet emerge as it does with other Black artists I share rooms with. These rooms. And the proximity to which I hold varying degrees of insecurity.
Rooms with good and bad floors, littered stranger’s hair knotted with my own, or settled dust that used to snow in the theater lights. Rooms with chairs like these that are used for butts in talk backs and shows, and to reach a stack of gels in the storage closet. In March of 2020 these rooms shuttered and collapsed into one, an apartment in Brooklyn, in one fell swoop. My life, my work, and my foreseeable future are all within a single tight periphery, simultaneously. With each email cancellation my inbox is a deadly weapon. This Tonya Harding blow lays me out and creativity doubles over to a crawl. I can still write. Mostly a series of lists: to-dos, how many times I cried. Then short musings on the evolution of ambulance sirens to fireworks, or smells coming from my neighbors’ culinary exploits. Facing this new solo, the orientation to my home grows into focus like the first time. I have never used my own toilet as much as I do now.
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2 / Objects
“I was a lousy pianist.” 1 - Marion Cuyjet
Had she not been from Philadelphia, not asked her friend for bus fare, not defied her mother, not been lousy at piano, I wonder if she would have danced anyway. If Essie Marie Dosey didn’t take a shine to her, didn’t pass her off as white to join the corps, didn’t arrange private lessons for her, I wonder if she would have found her way to teach dance. Had she not bore a daughter named Judy and not left her father, I wonder if she would have lovingly named her dance school “Judimar,” after their bond anyway. Had she not been a Black tenant (they called them Negroes then), I wonder if she would have been forced to rent on the second floor, taught her dancers to land the softest jumps, and moved her studio three times in five years due to noise complaints anyway.
Marion’s goal was “to make the first Black ballerina on pointe, in New York performing in a meaningful situation. It may not have been with a company. Janet Collins got there first at the age 38, dancing with the New York Metropolitan Opera. I was happy that she got there. Then I had to make as many ballerinas as possible, but they had to be brown-skinned. They had to look Negro. We were not calling ourselves Black back then. If she could pass for white, forget it. That would not give me anything. Her picture had to tell the whole story. I never worried about light-skinned girls. It was the brown-skinned girls I had to open doors for.” 2
A few years ago I visited 1310 Walnut Street, one of the former sites of the Judimar School of Dance. The building was from another time. I was glad for this. Not everything was erased. I looked up at the 3-story building, bisected by the updated vinyl siding of the ground floor and the peeling paint off the bricks of the top two. The sign for “Mr. Peter” the tailor remained fastened to the building but all the tenants were long gone. It was shadowed by the sleek steel and glass of modern day City Center Philly, directly across the narrow street. I imagined what I saw on the exterior was bleak in comparison to the scholarship that happened within. I couldn’t get inside. And the weekday lunch rush clipping my shoulders signaled for me to take the goddamn picture and “move.”
When you’re brought up and everyone tells you that you’re pretty, you learn very quickly that knowing you’re pretty is not desirable. Don't be vain. Carry your beauty with humility. Or else they will resent you for it. You do not want this because after all the years of people telling you that you’re beautiful you learn it’s all you have.
I have a lot of dances and a lot of processes under my belt because I have experience. I have experience because I have been in so many rooms. I was invited to those rooms because I am fluent in my technical and performative ability. I gained those abilities through study and training and practice. And I have been studying, training, and practicing since college. Which I was able to afford because my parents helped to pay for college, even though they strongly recommended that I did not major in Dance. They helped to pay for college because their parents helped them, because they went to college too. Four generations of college-educated folks was not about to stop with me. Recognizing the importance of an education, they also knew owning property and businesses was worth more than a number. They could own things like property and businesses because their parents weren’t slaves anymore and they carried a little piece of paper saying so. At first glance they weren’t identified as Black (they called them Negroes then) because of their light skin. They had light complexion because over and over they chose spouses who also could pass as white. And before this, further down the line, there was a man named Cuyjet who left Europe and went abroad. This same skin afforded them assignments inside the houses and ships of their owners. This allowed them to see the world and understand there is life and liberty free from the plantation. And when it came time to own a business, after all of those years in kitchens, a catering company was born. With business came security and health and more equity and the aspiration of “mobility.”
This follows me into every room I enter. Other times, it precedes everything I do. A reckoning I’ve come to acknowledge, and lack the language to express. I write to name it.
Nina Simone lists the things she’s got, “my arms, I got my hands, I got my fingers, got my legs…” and so on. Lists that are an assurance that her body replaces the tangible things (like “shoes”) and conceptual things (like “class”), that she ain’t got. I look at my hands, not a scratch on them.
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1 Melanye White-Dixon, "Marion Cuyjet: Visionary in dance education in Black Philadelphia," (doctoral dissertation, Temple University, 1987).
2 Ibid.
3 / Choreography
Mother would pick me up from school on Thursdays. On the way to dance “practice” (we didn’t call it rehearsal back then), we would stop at Roy Rogers for a bacon cheeseburger. I ate it in the car while she carefully ashed her Winston Light out of the crack of the car window. A quiet moment we shared each week.
I’m sure the teachers at the studio were highschoolers. But to me they were thirty-looking and skinny, like women I saw in the Cosmopolitan magazines I flipped through when I babysat my neighbor. As tall, bigger boned, and black-bodied I often wondered if I’m placed in the back row of our dances because I’m neither tall nor muscular. But I don’t dare ask. I should work on my switch-leaps and turn my doubles into triples. These are the things, I’m told, that will get me to the front row. But there is no time for these considerations and I push it to the back of my mind again. The competition is coming up this Saturday and we gotta make it to regionals. At least I can do the splits on both sides.
At home, my mom puts cold cream on my face, as I fondle my trophies.
Entrance of the Shades
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4 / Process
I’m writing to name the bind to this performance. I’m writing to call out the source. A spring overflowing, and the incessant buzz of a stereo without a groundwire. I’m writing to name her. I know the words. They fall on my ears like a good beat and make my head nod. They cut quick little murders in my heart. They create an entire picture of the past or perhaps a future, complete with smells, taste, and weather. She has a name. She is testing me with the trope of the Angry Black Woman. I am almost ready to introduce her.
I sit between her legs, hairless and like two twigs. My nightgown is paper thin from my sister having worn it until she grew too tall. A handmedown. She takes a comb and tilts my head slightly to the left, draws a long part on the side of my crown and presses her hands down on my stubborn wiry curls. It never went where either of us wanted. I wanted long, straight, and down. She wanted back and off my face. Frizzy, thick, coarse. These were things that were definitely a problem. A mistake to be corrected with heat, pressure, and efficiency. An heirloom to manipulate into my character and good fortune. To weave and churn until an alchemical shift presented me as the version I was expected to be. Because her mother expected this from her too. And this is love. This transference of transformation of what was into what can be, starting with a comb to my scalp. She tilts my head from one side to the other, and down and back. One side to the other, down and back. Taking cues from the tip of her fingers. Our first collaboration. Choreographies of many.
This performance is expansive. This is not a rehearsal. I’m unsure if I can stop. I’m asking myself “how long will this go on?” I’m asking myself “do you have to?” I’m asking myself “please stop.”
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5 / Show
My proximity to her changes each day I approach my desk. With, Marion. I measure how it feels to be so close to a history, a pride, and guilt. With it, of it. Locating center in relation to everyone else, I eliminate the need to explicitly say what ‘it’ is. (It being me, and you—our dynamic—my desires and wants outside of influence and hearsay.) I absorb cues in a flash, riffing off the surroundings. Quietly taking it all in. The silence settles me and ensures I never say anything out loud.
I tuck this practice in a hidden place. Well, not so hidden now. It’s warm here. And dark. Its own energy, built up by the compression of time and space. And this black is certain. This black has no nuance. No conditional. No exceptions. It devours any lie I can dream up. That I’m safe. That I’m sound. That I have everything I need at my fingertips. That my anxiety is a cloak I can rid myself of if I simply had the will to disrobe. And wouldn’t it be a show to do it right in front of you? Right out in the open so we can rubberneck at the reveal of this deep, dark, pulsating, pit of rage and nothingness. Because it is alive. It is hunting. It is always testing, poking at my skin from underneath looking for a soft spot. Sometimes the only way to soothe it is to feed it with rot. Let a little air out with a touch of destruction. It comes out in chain smoking. It comes out in three fingers of bourbon at noon. It comes out in my voice, hoarse from screaming into my pillow. It comes out in my refusal to “hang out” with you or be generous with my time and in any way. Nope, I don’t owe you shit. What would I do if I didn’t have to meet your expectations? Would I light up the room with warmth and grace? With all of the panache and personality that’s been constructed for me? Covering me in a thick coat of your concoction before the last one even has time to dry. A new cage for this rage.
Nah, I’ve got her down. Even as I birth her into life. She’s been right under my nose the whole time. She is the red blazer. She is my mom’s laugh at the grocery store clerk who says, “your children are soooo well behaved!” She is the enthusiastic acceptance of a free cut with the stylist who is “really good at curly hair.” She is like, really pretty and smells nice. Her music is not loud and tastefully obscure. Her patterns are tame, and her colors are muted. She makes herself small by binding that unruly hair back in a tight bun. She is tastefully grey. Perfectly beige. She ends her emails with “warmly” and believes it disarms its recipient because she knows she is armed upon arrival with her skin, her lips, her thiccness. She orients herself to front. She is ready. She is familiar with every detail in the room before she makes herself known. She is the lack of her own personal space. She is the “no, no, you go ahead.” She changes the words in jokes depending on who she might offend. She’s always joking. A nervous laugh perfected to sound so natural. She is from a good home and knows how to keep one. She knows how important it is to maintain legibility. So as not to confuse and cost her good name, popularity, her street cred. And on the other side, she smokes and drinks to get drunk. She screams.
Still, my tactics are weakening. Hasty, messy, and necessary. The veil is thin. But at least, I tell myself, as long as I am with something, I am not so alone.
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