Blondell Cummings Amy Iannuzzi

Where she started Born in South Carolina Raised in Harlem, NY Attended NYU Received graduate degree from Lehman College

Dance Background Original member of Meredith Monk’s company Trained with Martha Graham, Jose Limon and Meredith Monk Found inspiration inside Judson dancers Autobiographical work

“Chicken Soup” Solo Set: kitchen of the 1940s or 1950s Inspired by memories of Grandmother Food as connection

“Food for Thought” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6IIBTRGTyE

“Chicken Soup” continued “All she did was stand beside a shopping bag, sit in a kitchen chair, scrub the floor and dance with a frying pan. But she plunged the viewer into a remembered time and place, when the ladies of the neighborhood sat around a kitchen table, when the ladies of the neighborhood saw around a kitchen table as real as any Walker Evans photograph and talked of ‘children, friends, operations, death and money” -Jennifer Dunning, New York Times

Culture Debate Performed on the Dance Black American Program at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1983 “Chicken Soup” was seen as a take on African American women Cummings did not want limits on the solo She described it being for all woman and all cultures