Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures book and exhibition featured in Dance Magazine
This L.A. Exhibit Honors Blondell Cummings Through Rare Videos and Interviews
by Wendy Perron
Blondell Cummings in Just A Coupla Boomers Sittin Around Chillin, 2001. Video still from performance documentation. Courtesy The Kitchen, © The Estate of Blondell Cummings.
Rarely has a woman dance artist (other than Martha Graham or Anna Pavlova) been given an entire exhibit all to herself. But Art + Practice, in South Los Angeles, has teamed up with the Getty Research Institute to highlight Blondell Cummings’ unique place in the dance firmament. Cummings didn’t have big-name recognition like Judith Jamison, Carmen de Lavallade or Suzanne Farrell, but she was an essential bridge to the current dances of cultural identity. The exhibit, “Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures,” includes 17 video excerpts of rarely seen works, as well as interviews. It is now at Art + Practice until February 19.
For those who think that “Black dance” and postmodern dance have no intersection, Cummings (1944–2015) is a revelatory figure. She danced with Meredith Monk for 10 years and worked briefly with Yvonne Rainer and David Gordon. Monk’s visionary work, with its dreamlike imagery, haunting vocal flights and repetitive use of gesture, was a strong influence on Cummings. Like Monk, Cummings plumbed her memory, delving deep into her imagination to tell stories through dance. She brought her Black self—body and spirit—into every performance. Her authenticity and fierceness inspired many dance artists, including Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Edisa Weeks and Marjani Forté-Saunders.
Because of her interest in photography, Cummings developed a stop-action way of moving that became her signature, and she called it “moving pictures.” It was startling to see her actually do this onstage, to click through intense poses with a fevered precision that seemed about to burst into chaos.
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The catalog for “Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures,” with gorgeous photos by Lois Greenfield, Beatriz Schiller, Kei Orihara and Cherry Kim, actually completes the exhibit, which is mostly a video installation. We see Cummings in various modes, from glamorous to rough-hewn. The corners of the pages are like a flip-book, so you can thumb through to watch her sequences for hands and legs on the right. It’s her “moving pictures” in book form.
Scholar Thomas F. DeFrantz’s leading essay suggests that Cummings bridged not only the divide between postmodern dance and the more narrative tradition of “Black dance,” but also the divide between Black experimental work and more mainstream Black dance companies. He lovingly describes her bold choreographic investigations over the years. Among his many insights, I felt this one was particularly apt: “She demonstrated how autobiography could be an act of community.”