Living with the Doors Open: An Interview with Blondell Cummings

New York dancer/choreographer Blondell Cummings grew up in Harlem where her neighbors "lived with their doors open and you could hear their music." Cummings is still hearing the music of neighborhoods everywhere she goes. Her community workshops provide her with material for her performances. Here she is interviewed about that process by choreographer Veta Goler, who teaches dance at Spelman College. —Eds.

One of Blondell Cummings' most emotionally moving experiences as a choreographer and performer happened in 1983 when she performed her solo Chicken Soup on the Dance Black America Program at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In a videotaped interview with dance scholar Sally Banes, Cummings comes close to tears as she talks about this event.

Being asked to appear on the Dance Black America Program was flattering. Doing Chicken Soup was exciting. The opera house was packed. To do nontraditional dance and have black people say, "I truly understand" was wonderful. I thought, "So this is what it's all about." If I never have another moment like this again, it's been worth all the working.

Cummings was so moved by the warm reception of the black audience because it recognized the connection of Chicken Soup—and, by extension, her work—to African-American culture, and it affirmed her as an African-American woman artist, although her unique artistic expression is referential to the black experience in sometimes subtle and oblique ways.

Cummings' choreography and performance style are different from those of some other African-American dance artists in that, for the most part, she does not treat the black experience as isolated from other cultural experiences. Her work is universal as she explores differences and similarities in the lives of diverse peoples. Cummings' choreography clearly expresses her experiences as an African-American woman. However, because her personal growth and development have been achieved through her exposure to the ideas and customs of many nonblack peoples, Cummings has developed a world view in which African-American cultural practices are simply one kind of the many that make up the world.

Cummings was born in South Carolina some 40-odd years ago to sharecropping parents who grew cotton and tobacco, and moved with her family to Harlem before she was a year old. Her childhood appears to have been a blend of strictness and whimsy. Cummings' mother believed in the adage "Spare the rod and spoil the child," the choreographer recalls, so Cummings received the kind of physical discipline that has typically been administered in many black families. Oddly, her punishments gave her a sense of connection to the black community. She remembers yelling and screaming as loudly as she could while being spanked, in the hope that the threat of neighbors' intervention would cause her parents to stop. In fact, neighbors did occasionally check when they heard her screams to make sure that Cummings was not being abused, she says. This taught her that adults in her neighborhood knew much of what happened with her family, as well as with the rest of the community, and Cummings came to accept concern and responsibility for neighbors as an important part of the African-American community.

Her early experiences with music also contributed to the connection she felt to people in her community. In her Harlem neighborhood, Cummings says, "People lived with their doors open and you could hear other people's music. And it wasn't considered intrusive." Just as Cummings learned to appreciate her neighbors' music in her childhood, she later learned to appreciate other peoples' cultures.

Extensive travel has clearly influenced her work in this way. Cummings began traveling by herself in the late 1960s, before she began international dance touring, and before many African Americans traveled outside of North America. She has visited countries in Africa, Europe, Asia, the Caribbean and South America. Travel instilled in Cummings a curiosity about the world and revealed to her similarities and differences in activities and phenomena common to all peoples—such as eating, migration and death. Consequently, her artistic expression of African-American customs is within the context of other peoples' customs.

Cummings describes her dance background as eclectic. She has studied with virtually all of the major African-American modern-dance figures of her time. Among those with whom she has worked as a student or as a dancer are Alvin Ailey, Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, Rod Rodgers, Talley Beatty, Mary Hinkson and Eleo Pomare. Cummings has also had extensive training in the established white modern-dance techniques—studying with Alwin Nikolais, at the Martha Graham school, and taking classes in the techniques of Lester Horton, Merce Cunningham and Erick Hawkins. She ultimately became fascinated with idiosyncratic expression and studied with artists of the experimental Judson Church group of the early 1960s, including Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton and David Gordon. In addition, she danced with Meredith Monk's company, The House, for ten years.

Cummings is well known for her work as a solo artist, although she also presents group work under the name Blondelle. Her works include: Cycle and Flashdance, which look at menstruation and menopause, respectively; Food For Thought, a series of works exploring issues relating to food and eating; a number of works dealing with interpersonal relationships, presented under the titles Relationships: Intimate and Not So Intimate, Relationships: Good and Not So Good; and Like Family, and Basic Strategies, a series of five pieces concerning money. Her aesthetic—which is multidisciplinary, community-focused and process-oriented—moves between dance/theater and performance art. She incorporates dance, sign language and other gesture, text (ranging from oral histories to recipes), props, sets, photographs, video footage and live and recorded music. She creates work by eliciting the personal experiences of collaborating artists, other performers and the participants in her workshops.

Workshops figure prominently in her creative process. These exploratory and participatory gatherings, which she conducts in various communities around the country, center around some of the phenomena that all people experience—such as family, biological life cycles, food and money. She leads experiences and exercises designed to elicit from participants diverse responses to questions, issues and situations that she then incorporates into her work. The workshops are not especially for dancers, but are designed to bring together people of various ages, ethnicities and socioeconomic situations to explore cultural differences and similarities.

Cummings also utilizes the oral history interview to acquire autobiographical material for her artistry. She conducts these both within and outside of her workshops and incorporates information from them in numerous ways. She may include portions of the actual interview in a production or may take ideas from the interview and use them as movement or textual catalysts. The spoken text from oral histories completes Cummings' choreography in ways that fulfill her artistic vision. Cummings views her choreographic process as a form of storytelling, as a means of sharing moments with people—not simply of creating dances.

One of her earliest workshops was based on women's menstrual cycles. Participants in the workshop included women and men from a variety of cultures. They discussed menstruation, sharing their personal conceptions and experiences—one man thought all women's periods occurred simultaneously—as well as cultural myths and taboos related to this important part of women's lives. To Cummings, these workshops, and the performance pieces that develop from them, reveal distinct cultural perspectives. As such, they reflect and perpetuate community. Her sense of community, and her ideas about how her work relates to our changing communities, are revealed in her dialogue.

Veta Goler: How did you come to use community-based workshops so extensively for your choreography?

Blondell Cunmmings: I decided to do workshops because they helped me to focus on those issues that I thought might be important. Initially, when I did the menstrual cycle work, it was from a personal place—my menstrual cycle was an important part of my life. But in order to make it not indulgent, I wanted to give it a broader sense by sharing it with others. So I started talking about doing this piece, and women of all ages started to share their ideas, thoughts, fears, hopes and desires with me. I became the caretaker of that information, and my mission became to present something that was personal and, at the same time, an exploration of the issue on many other levels. Sharing with people from many different backgrounds and cultures became a way in which I could do research, and from that research, choose artistic methods that would best present the material.

VG: Would you talk more about the workshops—how you choose subject matter and who participates in them?

BC: Each workshop series is directly related to the project that I'm working on, whether it's food or menopause or family. Although it's not exclusive to the people who are connected to the particular subject matter, it certainly tends to draw people who are.

VG: So people who come to the workshops are closely related to the subject matter. What kinds of direction do you give them?

BC: The workshops are also directly related to my interdisciplinary approach to the work. So my work is dealing with movement; photographic imagery; text, such as storytelling, interviews or word associations; music and vocal stuff. Just as my work is a mixture of those things, the workshops will also be a mixture of those things—whether I conduct them myself, and bring all those areas into them, or in collaboration with other artists, who take on certain areas. For instance, in a menstrual cycle piece, we might sit in a circle and just talk about the first time we had our period. Or, if the workshop was on money, we might sit and talk about the first money we ever made. This sharing starts to give people information about each other, but also about the variety of ways there are of handling the very same thing. In the family workshop, we might do movements and put together a family folk dance based on gestures from family members. We might create a chant based on different ways of saying mother and father.

VG: The creative involvement of your performers, who are sometimes workshop participants, is a distinctive part of your work. How do you utilize their input?

BC: Basically, when I'm working with other artists, I let them take the lead on how they want to experiment with the idea. I give them the topic and the focus, and a sense of what I'm looking for. With workshops, I work with the material the participants, who are the experts at their particular movement, give me. For instance, someone might give me an excited gesture that a family member does. I might take it up into the air, or put it down on the floor, or turn it around and then give it back to them. So I can take liberties, because that's my job as the artist—to take their information and transform it into an involved kinetic movement phrase that they might not have seen before.

VG: In addition to providing performance outlets or opportunities to see theatrical work they have helped create, what is the impact of your workshops on the participants?

BC: I think that the things we do in the exercises are multilevel. The things that are discovered are not just in terms of movement material.

VG: So there are personal discoveries that people make about themselves and their own lives?

BC: Exactly. And [they also discover] that their perceptions are much deeper than they realize. Also, I like to think that in the after-sharing, that that automatically brings a sense of community. I had decided as an artist that when I left a situation, I wanted to feel like options were opened up to people, and that there was a possibility of dialogue that maybe didn't exist before—whether it was internal dialogues that people could have with themselves or external dialogues that they could have with other people. That's certainly important with racial things, with the menopause things, with the women's health things. I've hoped that all the subject matter I've chosen, in some form or another, would lead to dialogues like that. I'm getting better at broadening my sense of ways in which people can explore. So now, bringing in people from different areas for panel discussions gives a scholarly look at personal issues. Having the elders on video gives a sense of history. It's important that people feel that what they're doing in itself is history—that they can be affected by it and can affect it, by creating their own sense of history or ritual.

VG: You focus quite a lot on the family. What do you make of the recent emphasis on family in the work of other choreographers?

BC: There is this family thing that's going around. For me, it's just a natural progression of my work. It's not just a project, it's an accumulation of all the things that I've been doing—whether it was about friendships (family can be your friends); whether it was about money (in some cases, you got your first money from doing jobs in your family); or whether it was about food (it was about what your family had in their refrigerator). The family is always kind of the basis, or certainly part of all those projects. So for the last 16 years I've been dealing with family issues; now I'm talking about family as an issue.

VG: Are you saying that all of your work is about family?

BC: That for me seems to be a recurring point of reference—but family in the broad sense, not just your brother. Family in the sense of a focal place where one learns to share a sense of identity; a sense of relating to other things; a sense of interpretation of information. Perhaps eventually, it would be nice to have a Like Family Institute, where people could come and, using art as a basis, work on these kinds of things—either creating a new sense of family, or in bringing their families, do a whole range of activities, using the family and community as a focus.

VG: How do you feel about the recent popularity of community-based work?

BC: I think that we artists are naturally community. Just in the act of traveling from place to place, we're taking our works and bringing that experience to a lot of people. And that means that those people who have shared that experience of our work share a point of reference.

VG: So the artist becomes a point of reference to people who have experienced the work in various places?

BC: ...which becomes a communal experience. And so in that way, the fact that we travel worldwide, it makes us the ambassadors. It makes us creators of community in that global sense, because of the process in which we work, but also in the act of bringing the work.

VG: What can you say about the quality of community-based work you see in other choreographers?

BC: The strongest artists leave people feeling like they have a broad sense of options because of what the artists have shared with them in that community—be it AIDS, like Bill T. Jones; or Liz Lerman dealing with being older; or the women's and family issues that I'm dealing with. They also work with sponsors to create structures that not only allow communities to be active participants in the sharing, but at the same time, set up continuing dialogues after the artists leave. And they have a sense of the globalness that they are creating, because that creates a different kind of consciousness in approaching work and audiences.

VG: Which artists fall short in dealing with community?

BC: People who don't understand that doing community work requires responsibility, depending on how deep the subject matter is or how much the community is involved in what the artist is doing. For instance, if I'm going to bring people together to deal with family issues or bring families together to deal with certain issues, I'd better understand that some issues are very emotional and painful. Sometimes people cry! I'd better be clear that when they walk out of the room, if things have been brought up, that I've taken responsibility to make sure that these things are addressed, and taken care of, and that people are supported before they leave the door. You don't want to leave people hanging. We artists can be very powerful. So we have to be responsible to the people we are working with, and be responsible to the audience that we're bringing forth this information to. If you're bringing a subject matter that is very provocative, you make allowances for something to resolve that. I was working with an interracial company and was told that they had some unresolved racial issues. I said to myself, "How can I address this?" So I came in the next day, and said, "I'm going to do a section called I'm Sorry." And I'm Sorry became a very important part of the piece. Whenever I do family projects there is an I'm Sorry section in there. And you get to say I'm sorry about anything you want to say I'm sorry about.

VG: How does your work translate back to the community?

BC: Personal investment. People that come to me have a personal investment in what's going on because of the subject matter I'm using. Also the workshops, panel discussions, sharing of personal experiences, personal interviews, storytelling and the act of performing give people options and opportunities to involve themselves with others in the creative process. The creative process is a means of sharing and is a communal act. My work is communal, even when it is solo work. We are all individuals with the ability to connect as groups.

VG: You've emphasized the community connection of your work, even though you're a self-described loner. How does that work for you?

BC: When I do solo work, I am acting as the voice of the internal self. But that doesn't exclude the fact that that internal self has a desire to share with other internal selves. And that is part of the aesthetic experience that I hope to present—whether I'm doing a solo, which is dealing with the internal voice and the identity of a self, or a group piece, which brings together many people and many individual selves. To me, both are a kind of community, or an act of community. That's what I'm constantly exploring in my work. I'm trying to open out those options for individuals to define their own identities. I'm also exploring my own options. I'm investigating what that is about—as an artist, as a woman, as an African American, as a dog owner, as a neighbor that lives in my house, on my block, on the Upper East Side. These are all different communities, and they're all a part of who I am. Hopefully, in that act of sharing, people get a sense of community, and get to define community in a way that we haven't defined it before. As we move into the 21st century, our sense of community will be greater than we could possibly imagine, and our ability to grasp that, and rise to that, will directly affect how we connect our past and our future. Because it's not that it's new, it's just far more broadened, complex and expanded. But the issue has always been there. The family will always be there. Whether we have other people carry our kids, or whether we have them in test tubes, the issues will still be the same: Who will take care of the kids; how do people get socialized into the community; how do we nurture people into becoming contributors to society so that we can perpetuate ourselves, address future concerns and go as far as we possibly can go in this hemisphere of the universe? And yet, I think the only way to deal with it on some level is to go back to the very basics, which is what we do in our art and in our lives.

This interview originally appeared in High Performance magazine, Spring/Summer 1995.

Original CAN/API publication: September 2002