“It’s the beauty in things that we sometimes lose track of…. When I’m at my best I see it all around me.”
Rituals, environments, and materials of everyday life enthralled Blondell Cummings and inspired her to create art. Born in Effingham, South Carolina, and raised in Harlem, the artist was exposed to dance study in local public schools, and later received a bachelor’s degree in dance and education from New York University. She completed graduate work in film and photography at Lehman College, City University of New York, and continued studying modern dance at the schools of Martha Graham, Jose Limon, and Alvin Ailey. Cummings’s training in photography and film gave her the interdisciplinary background to meld these mediums into one artistic practice. She called her style of dance “moving pictures,” which drew from her love of theater, dance, performance art, television, and video art, which she also created herself.
Cummings draws her dance movements from photography: she has attempted to mimic a camera’s shutter speed with how she shifts her body, resulting in a visual embodiment of a photo contact sheet or collage, snapshots of different scenes. She tells stories through stream-of-consciousness practices like keeping a daily journal, as in her piece The Ladies and Me (1979), which she describes as “opening up different pages in someone’s book.” This work, spanning 30 minutes in its entirety, features several short dances depicting different stories, each new dance engaging a different song by Black female vocalists.
She is best known for Chicken Soup (1981), which was part of a larger six-part suite of works called Food for Thought (1983), inspired by time spent in her grandmother’s kitchen as a child. The work features Cummings’s unique vocalizations and jagged movements, music by Meredith Monk and Brian Eno, the recitation of a chicken soup recipe, and opportunities for the audience to participate. Chicken Soup was intended to show the nuances of the lives of women at home.
Cummings expanded on the theme of Black domesticity and everyday life in her 1988 film Commitment: Two Portraits. The first part features Cummings’s portrayal of a woman moving through her daily routine in a 1950s-style kitchen; the second features Cummings portraying a nun who says, “Why am I still here? What am I hanging onto? Because everything is important. Nothing is wasted and everything is important.”
After completing her studies, she created the Video Exchange, an organization that supported the use of the camera as a choreographic collaborator rather than a mere tool for documentation. In 1969, Cummings became a founding member of Meredith Monk’s company The House, where she continued to work as a dancer and choreographer. She has also collaborated with artists, choreographers, and musicians like Ishmael Houston-Jones, Senga Nengudi, and Yasunao Tone. Many notable dance companies have cited Cummings as a source of inspiration and have restaged her work numerous times.
Cummings leaves behind a legacy of artistic practice that weaves together modern dance training and audience participation with community building, exemplifying her belief that “choreography is always the act of sharing.”
José Miguel Camacho, Assistant Educator, Department of Learning and Engagement, 2024
Note: opening quote is from Campbell, Andy. “Blondell Cummings.” Artforum, 1 Mar. 2022, https://www.artforum.com/events/blondell-cummings-249591/.
