The Brooklyn Rail

Her lips utter silent words, held by cheeks both sturdy and expansive. Marjani Forté-Saunders’s face contorts, ballooning outward, briefly forming familiar expressions—smiles, frowns—before receding into a collage of mangled emotions. Brian Eno’s steady synth plays as she sits atop a wooden chair bathed in a warm, sunny spotlight. Clad in crisp white pants, a long-sleeve shirt, and an apron, she rocks her torso back and forth as she maps out maternity through mime—cradling a baby, braiding hair, and methodically sewing a garment mid-air. An expression of glee emerges, lasting only a few seconds, but held long enough to leave an imprint on the ether. This technique, merging slow-motion movement with snapshots of stillness, is what Blondell Cummings called “moving pictures,” a choreographic signature she pioneered in her acclaimed solo Chicken Soup. The original version from 1981 was inspired by Cummings’s “childhood memories of her grandmother in the kitchen,” as the Danspace Project program notes. By reimagining the solo nearly forty-five years later, Forté-Saunders expands upon Cummings’s rendering of familial histories, breathing a new life into the work—one brimming with grief, unity, and unadorned radiance.

The program “Danspace @ 50: The Work Is Never Done. Sanctuary Always Needed,” co-curated by Judy Hussie-Taylor and Seta Morton, celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of Danspace Project by reviving historic choreographies such as Donna Uchizono: Dedications / State of Heads (1999), OO-GA-LA Reimagined (The Fred Holland and Ishmael Houston-Jones 1983 Duet Danced into the 21st Century), and Bebe Miller Company: Vespers, Reimagined (2025). The organization has fostered New York’s dance community since 1974, and rather than insisting on the conservation of dance history through tradition alone, Danspace Project embraces and encourages reconfigurations of the past. In keeping with this ethos, Forté-Saunders graciously integrates her choreographic voice with Cummings’s, preserving the structural integrity of Chicken Soup through costuming, props, and gestural movement. At age twenty-three, Forté-Saunders was one of three dancers to ever learn the solo directly from Cummings, and the only dancer, other than Cummings, to perform the original iteration of the work. Her return to it at age forty proves the power of sourcing movement from personal experience. As we learn from the Q&A with Ishmael Houston-Jones, she’s included her own movement vocabulary: snapping peas, which her father taught her as a child in Prescott, Arkansas, and braiding hair, which harkens back to her mother’s days as a hairdresser.

Dried lavender skirts the perimeter of the hardwood floor, welcoming us into a fragrant, earthen realm. Sounds of rain and projections of streams, mountains, and greenery on the back wall engulf us in a world far removed from the city and its concrete confines, transforming St. Mark’s Church into a hologram of forestry. As Forté-Saunders vigorously scrubs the floor with a boar hairbrush on all fours, Meredith Monk’s voice rings out, telling us, “The kitchen was the same … it was easy to clean.” Her sterile candor contrasts with the enormous effort exerted. Forté-Saunders caresses the floor in figure eights, scouring the wooden stage with insistent strokes. She picks up a green iridescent cloth, circling it above her head in squiggly patterns to the somber and hypnotic hum of “Cow Song” by Meredith Monk & Collin Walcott melded with echoes of Erykah Badu’s isolated voice in “Master Teacher.” In a weary, trance-like state, Forté-Saunders walks upstage and ascends the stairs at the back of the church. She stands facing the audience, her neck outstretched and jaw unhinged. As she wails void of sound, a twelve-foot silhouette of a woman casts upon the back of the wall and walks toward her. Literally looming large, the figure registers as older and wiser—perhaps Cummings’s apparition. The projection extends her giant arms, opening them to Forté-Saunders, and they hug, generating a wave of relief.

Intermingling with the audience, Forté-Saunders waltzes through a row of chairs, stopping before a seated viewer to feed her from a cast iron pan—a prop integral to Cummings’s original choreography. The tenderness between them is palpable as Forté-Saunders places her fingers near the spectators’ mouth—a mother feeding a daughter. Soon after, a dancer in a linen outfit reminiscent of Forté-Saunders’s saunters through the crowd to part the lavender downstage. She joins Forté-Saunders in her kinetic fervor, their feet percussive and torsos pitched forward. Slowly, more women of varied ages enter the stage. They make warm eye contact with one another, meandering about as they too stir pots, cradle babies, and snap peas to prepare for dinner. The sound of bubbling water plays as they graze each other, their arms collectively moving to form one big family, undulating into the darkness.