Blondell Cummings

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Blondell Cummings (1944–2015) was an American modern dancer and choreographer known for her experimental and collaborative work. She was born on October 27, 1944, in Florence, South Carolina, and moved with her family to Harlem as an infant, later growing up in Queens. She earned a bachelor’s degree in dance and education from New York University and a Master of Fine Arts from Lehman College, and she also studied at the Martha Graham School.

Cummings helped start Meredith Monk’s company The House and appeared in Monk’s Education of the Girlchild (1973). She also acted in Yvonne Rainer’s Kristina Talking Pictures (1976). In 1978 she founded Cycle Arts Foundation, an interdisciplinary arts collective. She spent 1978–79 as an artist-administrator for the Cultural Council Foundation’s CETA Artists Project in New York.

She performed at venues such as The Kitchen, New York Live Arts, Danspace Project, and 92Y, and she toured across Africa, Asia, and the United States, including an artist-in-residence period at Jacob’s Pillow. She collaborated with writers and artists like Jamaica Kincaid, Jessica Hagedorn, and Ishmael Houston-Jones, and taught at Wesleyan, Cornell, and New York University.

Her best-known work is Chicken Soup (1981), a solo about memories of her grandmother in the kitchen, with music by Meredith Monk, Collin Walcott, and Brian Eno. The piece was designated an American Masterpiece in 2006 and was reconstructed for the Joyce Theater in 2007 by Urban Bush Women. In 1982 she helped start the Parallels series at Danspace with Ishmael Houston-Jones.

Cummings received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the U.S.–Japan Friendship Commission, and earned Guggenheim and Robert Rauschenberg fellowships. She appeared in documentaries on American dance and served for years on the Bessie Award Selection Committee. Blondell Cummings died on August 30, 2015, in New York City from pancreatic cancer, at age 70.