Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures book and exhibition featured in the LA Times
Blondell Cummings transformed choreography by approaching dance like ‘moving pictures’
by Danielle Broadway
Blondell Cummings in “Just a Coupla Boomers Sittin Around Chillin,” 2001. Video still from performance documentation.
(The Kitchen / © Estate of Blondell Cummings)
When Blondell Cummings got onstage and started dancing, audiences were blown away by her movements. Every moment was unpredictable, spontaneous.
Cummings broke barriers as a radical Black female dancer, choreographer and video artist through her experimental work, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s. Her work defied the conventions of postmodern dance at the time, which tended to favor softer, more predictable motions. The New York-based performer, who died in 2015, called her style of dance “moving pictures,” which drew from her love of theater, postmodern dance, performance art, television and video art and which she often recorded herself.
Although Cummings often performed solo, she collaborated on duets, ensembles, group pieces and hosted public workshops. She was a founding member of fellow dancer Meredith Monk’s company, the House, and collaborated with such trailblazing dancers as Ishmael Houston-Jones and Jessica Hagedorn. Her ability to build intimacy and suspense out of the ordinary occurrences of Black identity, family and spatial realism inspired contemporary experimental artists including Marjani Forté-Saunders.
X Artists’ Books has published the first monograph dedicated to Cummings’ legacy, “Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures.” The book details how she made waves in the white-dominated minimalist, postmodern dance world. Her novel expressionism combined postmodern dance, Black dance traditions and experimentation, which in turn helped other Black experimental artists to flourish within their own practices.