08/25/2025
SITE/less co-director Michelle Kranicke's review of "Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures" is up today on Bridge Magazine!
Up today over at the magazine, fellow humans, is Bridge Dance Editor Michelle Kranicke's review, "A Rare Glimpse of That Single Fleeting Moment," 'Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures' at the Chicago Cultural Center.
"Merce Cunningham famously said, 'You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.' This ephemerality also means that tracking dance’s history, especially before the advent of the iPhone, can be a Herculean task. For the average choreographer and performer with no access to academic resources, just trying to educate oneself about the art form’s history and some of its historical figures that are not easily accessed or even represented on the internet, is daunting. That is why the recent exhibition at the Cultural Center: 'Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures' (originally co-organized by Art + Practice and the Getty Research Institute) and organized here in Chicago by Elise Butterfield, Curator of Exhibitions at DCASE, was such a gift. The event showcased Blondell Cummings’ independent work in movement and video. Cummings, a student of dance, photography and film grappled with ideas of how movement, a 3-dimensional live art form could also be as powerful in a 2-dimensional medium. Her early studies searched for that place of compromise wherein the best of both methods were able to surface and the energy of the body and the details of the dancing would leap off the screen."
Read the full review at the link in our 🌳!
