Marjani Forté-Saunders performing Blondell Cummings’ Chicken Soup
Thursday, May 22 | 7:30PM
Friday, May 23 | 7:30PM
Saturday, May 24 | 7:30PM
Blondell Cummings’ most well-known work, Chicken Soup (1981), is a solo based on her childhood memories of her grandmother in the kitchen, performed in 1982 as part of the Parallels series curated by Ishmael Houston-Jones at Danspace Project.
Joan Acocella of The New Yorker wrote, “What made Chicken Soup so compelling—wild, funny, frightening—was the alternation between realism and surrealism.” The National Endowment for the Arts designated Chicken Soup an American Masterpiece in 2006, and in 2007, the work was reconstructed and restaged at the Joyce Theater in 2007 by Urban Bush Women. A deep and direct artistic transmission, Marjani Forté-Saunders was the first and among very few artists to ever learn Chicken Soup from Cummings and the only one other than Cummings to ever perform the solo.
Before you visit:
Accessibility at Danspace Project
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Marjani Forté-Saunders (she/her) is a 2023 United States Artists Fellow, and recently celebrated her debut as choreographer for the New York Metropolitan Opera, El Niño (2024). She is an awardee of the prestigious Dance Magazine Harkness Award (2020) and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Fellowship (2020). Saunders is a three time NY Dance & Performance/Bessie Awardee and an inaugural recipient of 3 distinguishing fellowships in dance, including Urban Bush Women’s Choreographic Center Initiative Fellowship (2017), the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship (2018), and the DanceUSA Artist Fellowship (2019).
Her practice has been forging my physical and energetic bodies to conjure transformative moments in space and time. Her art poses and processes questions, such as: What might freedom, a reality that elevates culture, life, wisdom, the intangible and mysterious, look like? Can we achieve it?
Marjani is a part of a multi-platformed collective vision called 7NMS (pronounced seven names), with composer and sound designer Everett Saunders. The work of 7NMS houses the Art, the Studios, and the Creative Incubator that is Art x Power- which is dedicated to building resilient futures for Black Artists, by creating pathways towards long-term, fiscal and creative wellness. The creative duo architects of the project, Prophet: The Order of the Lyricist, which premiered at Abrons Arts Center in 2022. 7NMS are recipients of New Music USA Award (2021), the MAP Fund (2020) and the National Dance Project Production & Touring award, for this work. In 2023, PROPHET had its Los Angeles premiere, at the REDCAT ROY AND EDNA DISNEY/CALARTS THEATER (REDCAT), and traveled to the Musuem of Contemporary Arts Chicago, May 2024.
Humbly, Saunders embraces the depth of her career and craft as a divine opportunity and command to listen, serve, and transform. She defines her work by its lineage stemming from culturally rich, vibrant, historic, loving, irreverent conjurers. With joy, Saunders’ most creative, commanding and rewarding practice is as a Mother, which operates inextricably alongside her visioning as an artist.