Reflecting on performance’s evolving and complex relationship to the archive, Seta Morton intricately connects her experience curating a re-staging of Blondell Cummings’s seminal dance work, Chicken Soup, with the rituals of food and community that shape how stories are held and told. In her prescient embrace of the camera as an active collaborator rather than mere witness, Cummings expands our ability to think through the “live and active cultural production” that Morton identifies in the act of carrying archives, both artistic and personal, into the future. Morton’s insights into her process of bringing Marjani Forté-Saunders’s performance of Chicken Soup to audiences deeply connected to the work through living memory, as well as new generations who have experienced the work solely through documentation, demonstrates the necessity of embracing the gaps, alchemy, and opportunities of the embodied archive. 

– Lumi Tan, 2025 EIR

PART I – My Grandmother’s Kitchen

The recipes that I steward are the ones my grandmother taught me. Now saved, digitized, and disseminated by my mother and aunt, this archive contains rough amounts, temperatures, approximate cooking times, and notes rendered almost illegible by the fading scans of her cursive handwriting. Gaps in the written record are filled by the live transmissions that I received from her in the kitchen. I recall her grace and her hands, how they folded, kneaded, and braided bread, brushing on butter and egg wash. I remember her multitasking and how it always produced an unintentional yet signature char—an incidental yet promised crispy bottom to every pot of rice. 

My grandmother’s recipes came from her own mother, who was a genocide survivor and brought ancestral recipes into a new diasporic culture in the Depression-era Bronx. These recipes call for a lot of canned vegetables, shortening, and shelf-stable ingredients, as well as other clever methods meant to save money and create something out of nothing. When I make them now, I use fresh produce, high-quality oil and butter—probably what they used before our homelands were stolen. What has not changed over time is the serendipitous crispy bottom of the pot. Like my grandmother, I am also multitasking with a loose grip on time. But it’s become intentional to let the rice go a bit longer after all the broth has been absorbed. A ritual in memoriam; a conjuring. That part of the recipe is an embodied inheritance within my lineage.

In the kitchen, ingredients alchemize and become something more than the sum of their parts. The transformative act continues even after a meal is made. Whether food digests through our bodies or rots in the refrigerator, transmutation is inevitable. We carry recipes into new places and eras, modifying them to accommodate migration, changes in food systems or resources, dietary restrictions and desires. A recipe, like an artist’s archive, helps us remember and preserve into the future what is otherwise ephemeral and impermanent. 

An archive is a collection of memories and memorabilia, organized and puzzle-pieced together to form a historic and often instructive picture. As new generations, technologies, and perspectives encounter the archive, it changes over time and is constantly renewed. I’d like to imagine the archive as a growing, living, and accumulating history. Like the live active culture from my grandmother’s yogurt—which theoretically could be passed down for infinite generations—our histories, stewarded with care, can be carried into a boundless future. Changed by the many hands that tend them, both the yogurt and the archive can live on as alchemical time capsules. If we’re lucky, our stories are told into the future by many voices, who remember us as we were and reimagine what we’ve left behind. A live and active cultural production.

PART II — Moving Pictures

“Inside the refrigerator, everything was rotting: a half finished carton of sour skim milk, a head of wilted lettuce, a moldy container of dannon yogurt, two moldy yellow lemons, one two week old boiled egg, a bottle of flat seltzer water, and a split of mum’s champagne.”

––Excerpt from “Food Portrait,” written & recorded by Patricia Jones Mindy Levine, in collaboration with Blondell Cummings¹

Choreographer and video artist Blondell Cummings (Oct 27, 1944–Aug 30, 2015) told stories about the cycles of women, food culture, community, family, and Black life in her work. Through a distinctly feminist lens, she experimented with postmodern and Black dance traditions. In a choreographic assemblage² drawing on both somatic and photographic practices, she once described her work as “a combination of the photographic image with the kinetic energy.”³ With a keen attention to portraiture, theatricality, and emotional detail, Blondell developed a technique she named “moving pictures.” She choreographed gestural snapshots, utilizing isolation, rhythm, repetition, and social choreographies to produce a filmic effect, articulating an embodied space between fluidity and photographic capture. With a stop-motion-like staccato, her kinetic jolts between fragmented stillness and flowing movement are viscerally felt by her witnesses, beckoning a kinesthetic empathy that is electrifying. 

Blondell received her first camera at the age of eleven in Harlem. A gift from her father, it opened up a new world for her. She began to study people and portraits closely: “The thing that I liked most about photography, was that I could look at a picture a week later, two months later, six months later, and it would always bring me back to that moment in time in which that picture was taken, and all the events around it.”⁴ In her hands, the camera became a vessel for memory, a conduit for time travel, and a tool for relational connection. 

“With a stop-motion-like staccato, her kinetic jolts between fragmented stillness and flowing movement are viscerally felt by her witnesses, beckoning a kinesthetic empathy that is electrifying.”

In her work as a dance artist, Blondell squarely confronted tensions between the ephemerality of live performance and the permanence of photographic images. “When I started studying dance,” she said, “the thing that I noticed was that once the performance was over, that was it … people didn’t have the same kind of memory recall to that fleeting image.”⁵ She carried this attention to time and memory, which marked her photographic work, into her concerns about dance. In the excerpted quote from Blondell’s “Food Portrait,” one can also glean a sense of grief around the precarity of ephemerality; time, and its insistence on always moving us forward, begets transformational loss. With the camera, she tracked time through an everlasting photographic image, while with food matter, she tracked time through the inevitable process of rot and decomposition (reminiscent of the body’s own assured decay).  

Blondell began reconciling these tensions by documenting dance on film. Although not yet a common or easily accessible practice for live theater and dance artists, documentation was a fierce priority for Blondell, and these forms, videography and choreography, would become intertwined in her practice and inextricably linked in her work. As her professional career as a dance maker was burgeoning in the late 1960s, she founded a production company called the Dance Channel⁶ to document dance works and adapt staged performances for the screen.⁷ While prioritizing the camera to document dance, her movements began to mirror the fragmented quality of the camera’s produced image, resulting in her “moving pictures” gestural language. In her dances, she embodied multiple characters and layered emotional states in quick succession, sourcing found pedestrian actions such as rocking a baby, washing floors, or pulling a needle and thread. Her movements were unmistakably human in their recognizability and yet produced a robotic quality through her manipulation of time, rhythm, and repetition. It seems as if the camera served as both an archival tool of capture as well as a generous collaborator in generating movement, style, and artistic sensibility, creating a critical and creative feedback loop.

PART III — Chicken Soup

3-4 lbs of chicken (cut up) 

Chicken feet (scaled and nails removed)

3-4 quarts of water

1 tablespoon salt 

2 stalks celery or 1 cup celery root diced 

¼ teaspoon pepper

⅛ teaspoon nutmeg

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Cover chicken and chicken feet with water

add salt

bring to a boil 

simmer slowly (3 or more hours)

add the vegetables 

boil 1 hour longer

strain 

remove fat

add seasoning to taste

remove chicken when tender 

and serve with brown sauce⁸

Chicken Soup (1981) is a solo based on Blondell’s memories of her family kitchen. Designated an American Masterpiece in 2006 by The National Endowment for the Arts, it has become the most celebrated work of her career. She performed many versions of Chicken Soup over decades and in 1982, brought the work to Danspace Project as part of the seminal and historic Parallels series, curated by Ishmael Houston-Jones. A constellation of rising Black stars of the ’80s downtown dance scene, the choreographers of Parallels⁹ were invited by Houston-Jones to present original works responding to his budding inquiries on experimentation and Black American dance. “Is there such a thing as Black Dance in America? Is there ‘mainstream’ Black Dance? And if it did exist, who was pushing the boundaries of that mainstream?,” Houston-Jones asked.

By centering a single character—a Black woman in her own kitchen—Chicken Soup challenged preconceived ideas about Black women and domestic servitude. Blondell insisted white audiences see her through her own lens, while connecting with and reflecting back her Black audiences. I first witnessed a section of the work as a young dance student at The New School via a grainy video clip from a 1989 performance at Jacob’s Pillow. Blondell’s commanding presence was powerfully significant in the predominantly white postmodern spaces she navigated. Also highly relatable to me as I traversed these same white spaces when encountering the documentation in 2012—some things transform slowly. 

Other spaces deliberately cycle back. Now Associate Curator at Danspace Project, I returned to the video documentation of Blondell’s 1982 Parallels performance of Chicken Soup, which is archived at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, while preparing for our 2025 fiftieth-anniversary season. I’ve watched this documentation many times now. Sometimes it has my full attention. But often, including today, I am doing many things at once—watching the archival footage, cleaning, and cooking in my own kitchen.

The scene takes place in the character’s home¹⁰

The video begins with Blondell standing near the back door of St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery.¹¹ She’s dressed in an all-white petticoat, pants, and apron—her back to the camera. Slow like molasses, she reaches down to her side to grasp a brown paper grocery bag. The camera blinks twice, framing various vignettes: she swings the bag side to side; holds it in front of her face; and then gently places it back down, head bowed, before walking away. Her steps are somehow both automatic and diaphanous. A recorded nostalgic melody by Brian Eno accompanies her movements in this opening sequence. Another sonic layer throughout the entire video is a tinny and static whine produced by the process of digitization. The archive makes itself known and audibly sirens the imposing alterations of age and deterioration.

Blondell travels to a chair set upstage and surrenders into her seat. Her head lowers and arms briefly rise in a full body exhalation. She begins to cycle through a series of “moving pictures.” We hear her pre-recorded and projected voice narrate an excerpt from Pat Steir’s “Kitchens, 1970” about a get-together with friends. While carefully miming the setting of an invisible “enameled table,”¹² she describes the “flower print house dresses”¹³ worn by her absent guests. She rocks back and forth, taps her toes joyfully, and mimes sipping from a cup with swooping arms, fingers flying. “All summer they drank iced coffee, with milk in it.”¹⁴ Her eyes glance slyly down to her side at a quick and yet sustained clip—a movement she would recycle in near-perfect repetition, the rhythm like a flip-book. The poem takes a heavier turn as the conversation pivots from chatter about childhood friends toward “operations and abortions.”¹⁵ Blondell’s gestural freeze-frames quicken and escalate. Her arms rise and fall in a scooped shape, as if furiously rocking a baby. A pointed finger cuts through the frenzy. Her whole body elevates and contracts. A flexed foot raises over the floor, hovering. Finally, her mouth widens into a silent wail—“Death and money.” She lets the tension go and returns to her rocking rhythm, dealing out invisible dollar bills like a card game. 

I feel the precision of each of her expressive, assertive movements deep in my belly; the musicality of her body, busy at task; how her hands transform as they stylistically tend to invisible yet recognizable things. Tracking the ebbs and flows of an afternoon around a table with women, Blondell moves through a spectrum of relatable emotional states—from the very polite to the deeply grotesque. 

PART IV — A Ritual

Numerous institutions hold the historic record of Blondell’s sprawling archive, but only one performer holds the embodied archive of Chicken Soup: Marjani Forté-Saunders. She first performed the work in  2007, when it was restaged at the Joyce Theater by the Black women-led dance company, Urban Bush Women. Still in her twenties, Forté-Saunders was one of only two dancers known to have learned the piece directly from Blondell, and the only person to ever publicly perform the solo other than Blondell herself. An artist’s choice to teach their work, especially a self-performed solo, to another performer is often an intimate and vulnerable endeavor. Moreover, Chicken Soup is made up of both set choreography and improvisational scoring, which requires a certain akin mode of attention from the choreographer and dancer, to locate difference and specificity. This in-studio transmission between Blondell and Marjani generated a deep link in a long and constellatory lineage of Black experimental dance. 

Encouraged by a gentle nudge from curator and colleague, Tara Aisha Willis, Danspace’s Executive Director, Judy Hussie-Taylor, and I commissioned Marjani, who remembered, re-learned, and performed the work again almost two decades later for our fiftieth-anniversary season in May 2025. In approaching this commission, we had to obtain permission for the work to be performed. When the artist is no longer living, this process can be particularly sensitive and difficult. Expecting to be sent down an administrative path of paperwork and various institutional archives, I consulted my colleague, Kristin Juarez, who curated Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures (2021–2022), the first solo exhibition of  Blondell’s work. To my surprise and delight, Kristin put me directly in touch with Blondell’s living family. Our conversations with Blondell’s sister and two nephews were generous, expansive, and filled with mutual interest and gratitude. A blessing and an honor. At the opening performance, they all sat front and center, proud, attentive, and responsive to Marjani’s iteration. Blondell’s sister in an all-white outfit, matched Marjani’s own.

The kitchen was the same.¹⁶

Marjani’s relationship to the choreography of the kitchen has evolved since she first performed Chicken Soup in 2007. Now a seasoned mother and successful choreographer in her own right, she took more liberties with the improvisational aspects of Blondell’s score—adding more of her own flavor while sticking close to the bones and digging deeper into the marrow of Blondell’s original recipe. 

The stage in the St. Mark’s Church sanctuary was set the same: a brown paper bag, a chair, a scarf, a cast-iron skillet, a brush. Distinctly, Marjani placed a wall of dried lavender along the perimeter of the stage. She moved through the series of emotional and static gestures and images as taught to her by Blondell. In a recent conversation, Marjani said that she didn’t remember Blondell ever calling this technique “moving pictures” in the studio with her.¹⁷ Instead, she remembers that Blondell stressed the importance of  being present with her own embodied memories. For the work to remain honest for another performer, Blondell insisted that at least some parts of the work must be changed. So, she encouraged Marjani to infuse the work with recollections of her own family kitchen. Marjani’s family snapped peas and braided hair, and these mimed actions became part of her unique performance of Chicken Soup, both in 2007 and 2025.

In this 2025 iteration, Marjani continued to innovate, crafting her own beginnings and endings. The piece opens with a grounding and unifying incantation.¹⁸ Marjani conjures a portal of Black radical futurity while frankly acknowledging the present state of global crisis. It’s a prayer to soothe our nervous systems, to “reclaim them from the bad faith spells of authoritarianism … energetically steal ourselves out of oppression,” and “move into … unfukwitability.”¹⁹ She also directly addresses and interacts with the audience throughout the piece. Inviting Blondell’s choreographed movements to cascade more freely down her spine and through her pelvic floor, she performs a surprise lap dance on a (planted) audience member. Distinct from Blondell’s original performance, there’s some ass-shaking in this 2025 version of the recipe. Though Marjani includes a more overt sexuality than Blondell, her insistence on bodily autonomy and sensual power echoed Blondell’s original formations. With these elaborations, Marjani commits to the work’s Black feminist spirit and the experimental, postmodern, and African diasporic traditions that it participates in. Like Blondell, she weaves together both ancestral and modern technologies of the body, and transforms the kitchen into a space of ritual. 

In the original recipe, Blondell’s solo seemed almost lonely, accompanied only by the shadows her figure cast on the walls. Marjani also casts shadows, her silhouette splashed between the stained glass windows. Later, she ascends the altar of St. Mark’s, her mouth agape in that silent and gut-wrenching wail of grief. A projected image of Blondell’s shadow approaches Marjani’s own in an impossible embrace. The late choreographer towers over the living artist—an ancestor larger than life. 

But Marjani also calls on an abundance of other makers and voices. In the last section, which she titled Ritual: A Chicken Soup Annex, Marjani is joined onstage by an intergenerational chorus of Black femme guest performers who represent a lineage of radical experimenters and artists that flows from, within, and beyond Blondell—ancestors in training. Initially planted as audience members in the house of the theater, they rise to their feet to the surprise of their seated neighbors. After peeling off their street clothes to reveal angel-white costumes, they flood the stage one by one, joining Marjani. They move in concentric circles, whirlpooling around one another while miming Blondell’s signature pan-shaking gesture, which comes earlier in the piece. Throwing ingredients of their own choosing into their pans, they each add necessary change to an accumulating recipe, creating a living archival contribution in real time. 

PART V – A Polyvocal Archive

“​​Community stewardship suggests that returning to the archive, flagging unstable material is important to the material’s survival. Community stewardship through a return to archives also helps augment finding aids so that people who went unrecognized, and thus unnamed and hidden in the archives are resurfaced. These acts of expanding who was—and is—in community enables a polyvocal narrative—one that is wilder and more interesting than a reductive history.”²⁰

— Kristin Juarez, Ph.D. (Senior research specialist at the Getty Research Institute)

The kitchen is a decoy. Often seen as a domestic and docile space, it is actually a spiritual conduit, a vessel for time travel, and a powerful gathering place for women making good trouble. Through the work of women, the alchemy of chicken soup is born—a universal and timeless source of hearty comfort, substantial nourishment, and vital sustenance. Like a dance, the recipe of a chicken soup is informed by the culture of its makers—it is iterative and accumulates over time, across our individual yet interconnected experiences. 

As our stories and histories are remembered into the future, they transform and take new shape—told by both forgotten and new voices, in new spaces and places, times and contexts. Like our bodies and our culture, our art evolves, ages, dies, decays, composts, and transforms over time. The archive is crucial to our historical memory, but the archival document can only take us so far: the body must come in eventually, with all of its miraculous imperfections and devastating failures. Without this vital ephemera—the body and its recall—the archive is incomplete. So I cook with my family and speak to them in the ancient and almost forgotten language that my grandmother spoke, using what few words I remember. The recipe changes gradually, then cumulatively, as time goes on. As it passes down our matrilineal line, we re-member it into an unknown future. 

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Seta Morton is an interdisciplinary curator, performance producer, writer and editor based in New York, NY. She is the Program Director & Associate Curator at Danspace Project and the editor for Danspace’s digital and print publications. Seta has edited fifteen publications to date at Danspace and has co-curated numerous performances, artist commissions, public programs, residencies, and artist research fellowships. She has co-organized four Danspace Platforms with Chief Curator, Judy Hussie-Taylor (2021 + 2022) and with guest artist-curators Okwui Okpokwasili (2020) and Kyle Abraham (2024). Seta co-curated Danspace’s 50^th Anniversary Festival with Judy Hussie-Taylor in 2025.  In her work as an independent curator, Seta organized V E S S E  L / / F E R M E N T: archive alchemy (make it a prayer), an evening of poetic readings and rituals for all-Black audiences at Pageant in Brooklyn, NY (February 2024) and curated The Burden, an exhibition of sculptures by Yves B. Golden, at the Feminist Center for Creative Work in Los Angeles, CA (Fall 2024). Seta was previously an independent producer for artists Sarah Michelson (2016-2018) and iele paloumpis (2021-2022) and worked as an administrator for choreographer Ishmael Houston-Jones (2017-2019). Seta’s writing has been published by Danspace Project, Imagining: A Gibney Journal, The Feminist Center for Creative Work /Co-Conspirator Press, Villa Albertine, BOMB Magazine, and Topical Cream. 

NOTES

1. Program note from an early iteration of Chicken Soup (1981) by Blondell Cummings. Cited in Danielle Brito, “Locating the Poetics of Collage in Blondell Cummings’s ‘Chicken Soup,’” The Kitchen: On Mind, September 19, 2023, https://thekitchen.org/on-mind/locating-the-poetics-of-collage/.
2. Sampada Aranke, “‘I’m a child of history, a part of history…’: Assembly and Emergence in Blondell Cummings’s Photographic Dance,” in Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures, eds. Kristin Juarez, Rebecca Peabody, and Glenn Phillips (Los Angeles: X Artists’ Books, 2021), pp. 77-89.
3. Blondell Cummings, An Evening with Blondell Cummings, Jacob’s Pillow, Inside/Out series, August 14, 1984, 1:20. Cited in Tara Aisha Willis, “Moves, Stages, and Frames: a visual essay on Blondell Cummings,” in Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures (see note 2), p. 91.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. The Dance Channel soon after became a non-profit called the Video Exchange.
7. Thomas De Frantz, “Blondell Cummings: A Personal Postmodernism,” in Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures (see note 2), p. 40.
8. Quoted in video documentation of Blondell Cummings, Chicken Soup, Performance at Danspace Project in New York City, Parallels Series #1, October 29, 1982, 603453, Blondell Cummings Collection, New York Public Library Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York. https://archives.nypl.org/dan/185514.
9. Choreographers included Blondell Cummings, Fred Holland, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Rrata Christine Jones, Ralph Lemon, Bebe Miller, Harry Sheppard, and Gus Solomons Jr.
10. Program note from Blondell Cummings, Chicken Soup, Performance at Danspace Project in New York City, Parallels Series #1, October 29, 1982. Quoted in Blondell Cummings, Chicken Soup (see note 8).
11. Blondell Cummings, Chicken Soup (see note 8).
12. Excerpt from Pat Steir’s “Kitchens, 1970.” Quoted in Blondell Cummings, Chicken Soup (see note 8).
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Marjani Forté-Saunders, “Lunder Institute Summer Think Tank: The Dance Records of Blondell Cummings,” Summer Think Tank, guest curated by Dr. Kristin Juarez (Lunder Institute, Colby Museum of Art, Waterville, ME, July 24, 2025).
18. An excerpt from “The Tetra,” Marjani Forté-Saunders performing Blondell Cummings’s Chicken Soup, Danspace Project, New York, May 29–31, 2025.
19. Ibid.
20. Kristin Juarez, unpublished lecture, Conversations Without Walls: An afternoon of screenings, discussion, dance, and context to illuminate Variations on Themes from Lost and Found: Scenes from a Life and other works by John Bernd, Danspace Project, New York, May 20, 2023.