Photo: Maria Brananova
Ever Present: Garden of Unicorns
GETTY CENTER
Central Garden
This is a past event
A Surrealist Ode to Blondell Cummings imagined by Marjani Forté-Saunders
Choreographer Marjani Forté-Saunders presents a tribute to renowned dancer Blondell Cummings (1944–2015) that evokes the celestial and miraculous figure of the unicorn. Performed by an ensemble of dancers in the Central Garden, Forté-Saunders brings her own choreography into conversation with Cummings’s signature work, Chicken Soup, first performed in 1981. Mirroring Cummings’s alchemical transformation, Forté-Saunders weaves movement, sound, and media to offer historic and personal narratives as embodied tales of lineage, unabated love, and warriorship.
This event celebrates the publication of Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures, which accompanied the exhibition by the same name at Art + Practice (September 18, 2021–February 19, 2022).
About the Performance
In Chicken Soup, Blondell Cummings made an enchanting and riveting theatrical performance from memories of cooking cherished family recipes in the kitchen. To envision her new work, Forté-Saunders writes, “I brought Blondell Cummings with me, and we danced together, for a moment. Chicken Soup shows a Black woman in her own kitchen, scrubbing her own floors, snapping her own peas, wielding her own frying pan. By evoking this work, we get to examine those kitchen tools as portals—bending time to further the narrative of space, character, and rite.”
About the Artist
Marjani Forté-Saunders is a Mother, choreographer, performer, community organizer and three-time Bessie Award winner. She is an awardee of the prestigious Dance Magazine Harkness Promise Award (2020) and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Fellowship. Saunders is an inaugural recipient of three distinguishing fellowships including Urban Bush Women’s Choreographic Center Initiative Fellowship (2017), the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship (2018), and the DanceUSA Artist Fellowship (2019); she is also a two-time Princess Grace Foundation awardee. She is a founding member of the collective 7NMS, alongside her husband, composer Everett Saunders. They are recent recipients of New Music USA and the National Dance Project Production & Touring award for Prophet: The Order of the Lyricist. Humbly, she defines her work by its lineage stemming from culturally rich, vibrant, historic, loving, irreverent conjurers.
Presented by the Getty Research Institute and the Getty Museum’s Ever Present performance series.