1. Blondell Cummings
Amy Iannuzzi

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

3. 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

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

5. “Food for Thought”

6. “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

7. 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