For All Your Life

Part film, part live performance, part social experiment, For All Your Life challenges audiences to meditate on the value of black life and black death. Specifically the value of the life, work, and death of choreographer and artist Leslie Cuyjet. The performance itself is a “sales pitch,” one that culminates in a call to action: to invest in Cuyjet, by buying into her life insurance policy. (“What has more value than ‘saying her name’ when she’s dead? Investing in her life, today!”) The audience receives an opportunity to offer support, with real money, and “own” a piece of black life. An opportunity they can reckon with, invest in, or ignore.  

This work rewrites a performative narrative tradition where artist serves the audience. Instead, Cuyjet’s pitch asks viewers to navigate the value of black life versus black death within their own sensibility, within what is real or fiction, authentic or snake oil, and decide if it is worth their money. The pitch, and its accompanying video presentation, teaches us about life insurance and its direct connection to slavery, highlights the way we respond to death, and provokes reflection on how we regard life, especially the lives of people of color.

The seed for this work began after discovering that the insurance company, New York Life, once sold policies on the lives of slaves, and whose former tagline inspired this title. For All Your Life by design will last for all of Cuyjet’s life. A website (forallyourlife.com) serves both as an online archive of the life of the project, as well as a marketplace; a financial instrument where people can invest, allowing this project to exist beyond the performance, and “for all your life” too. Comment end