In South Carolina, her parents had been sharecroppers, growing cotton and tobacco,[1] and when they moved to New York, her father worked as a cab driver and her mother as a domestic aid then a nurse.

[4] She spent two years (1978–79) as an artist-administrator for the Cultural Council Foundation CETA Artists Project in New York City, overseeing other dancers as well as choreographing and dancing her own pieces.

[3] One of Cummings's most well-known works was Chicken Soup, a 1981 solo based on her childhood memories of her grandmother in the kitchen, featuring music by Meredith Monk, Collin Walcott, and Brian Eno.

[9] In a review of a 1983 performance of the work, the New York Times observed, All she did was stand beside a shopping bag, sit in a kitchen chair, scrub the floor and dance with a frying pan.

But she plunged the viewer into a remembered time and place, when the ladies of the neighborhood sat around a kitchen table as real as any Walker Evans photographed and talked of "childhood, friends, operations, death and money.

"[10]In a more recent article on Ishmael Houston-Jones, Joan Acocella of The New Yorker, wrote of the piece, In 1981 Blondell Cummings made a dance, "Chicken Soup," in which, while scrubbing a floor on her hands and knees—an act of exemplary realism—she would repeatedly break off, rear up, and shake, in jagged, convulsive movements, as if she were in a strobe light.

This strange back and forth made the piece very interesting psychologically: the floor-scrubbing so homey and soapy and nice (Cummings wore a white dress), the convulsions so violent and weird.