Born in 1909 during the turn of the century Victorian era in the small town of Glen Ellyn, Illinois, she became one of the first dance anthropologists, started the first internationally-touring pre-dominantly black dance company . As a student, she studied under anthropologists such as A.R. Encouraged by Speranzeva to focus on modern dance instead of ballet, Dunham opened her first dance school in 1933, calling it the Negro Dance Group. In addition, Dunham conducted special projects for African American high school students in Chicago; was artistic and technical director (196667) to the president of Senegal; and served as artist-in-residence, and later professor, at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, and director of Southern Illinoiss Performing Arts Training Centre and Dynamic Museum in East St. Louis, Illinois. Dunham is credited with introducing international audiences to African aesthetics and establishing African dance as a true art form. Other movies she performed in as a dancer during this period included the Abbott and Costello comedy Pardon My Sarong (1942) and the black musical Stormy Weather (1943), which featured a stellar range of actors, musicians and dancers.[24]. Facts about Alvin Ailey talk about the famous African-American activist and choreographer. She also created several other works of choreography, including The Emperor Jones (a response to the play by Eugene O'Neill) and Barrelhouse. Commonly grouped into the realm of modern dance techniques, Dunham is a technical dance form developed from elements of indigenous African and Afro-Caribbean dances. She also choreographed and appeared in Broadway musicals, operas and the film Cabin in the Sky. Numerous scholars describe Dunham as pivotal to the fields of Dance Education, Applied Anthropology, Humanistic Anthropology, African Diasporic Anthropology and Liberatory Anthropology. Katherine Mary Dunham (also known as Kaye Dunn, June 22, 1909 - May 21, 2006) was an American dancer, choreographer, author, educator, and social activist. [37] One historian noted that "during the course of the tour, Dunham and the troupe had recurrent problems with racial discrimination, leading her to a posture of militancy which was to characterize her subsequent career."[38]. There is also a strong emphasis on training dancers in the practices of engaging with polyrhythms by simultaneously moving their upper and lower bodies according to different rhythmic patterns. In 1939, Dunham's company gave additional performances in Chicago and Cincinnati and then returned to New York. Question 2. Katherine Dunham always had an interest in dance and anthropology so her main goal in life was to combine them. Birth date: October 17, 1956. Dunham became interested in both writing and dance at a young age. A fictional work based on her African experiences, Kasamance: A Fantasy, was published in 1974. Dunham used Habitation Leclerc as a private retreat for many years, frequently bringing members of her dance company to recuperate from the stress of touring and to work on developing new dance productions. In particular, Dunham is a model for the artist as activist. She built her own dance empire and was hailed as the queen of black dance. Katherine Johnson graduated from college at age 18. Throughout her distinguished career, Dunham earned numerous honorary doctorates, awards and honors. He has released six stand-up specials and one album of Christmas songs. Kraut, Anthea. : Writings by and About Katherine Dunham. Dunham, Katherine dnm . In 19341936, Dunham performed as a guest artist with the ballet company of the Chicago Opera. New York City, U.S. Our editors will review what youve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. The school was managed in Dunham's absence by Syvilla Fort, one of her dancers, and thrived for about 10 years. Schools inspired by it were later opened in Stockholm, Paris, and Rome by dancers who had been trained by Dunham. She also appeared in the Broadway musicals "Bal . Birth City: Decatur. Dunham had one of the most successful dance careers in African-American and European theater of the 20th . In her biography, Joyce Aschenbrenner (2002), credits Ms Dunham as the "matriarch and queen mother of black dance", and describes her work as: "fundamentally . Dancer. American dancer, choreographer, and anthropologist. In 1950, Sol Hurok presented Katherine Dunham and Her Company in a dance revue at the Broadway Theater in New York, with a program composed of some of Dunham's best works. He lived on 5 January 1931 and passed away on 1 December 1989. Regarding her impact and effect he wrote: "The rise of American Negro dance commenced when Katherine Dunham and her company skyrocketed into the Windsor Theater in New York, from Chicago in 1940, and made an indelible stamp on the dance world Miss Dunham opened the doors that made possible the rapid upswing of this dance for the present generation." Intrigued by this theory, Dunham began to study African roots of dance and, in 1935, she traveled to the Caribbean for field research. In 2000 Katherine Dunham was named America's irreplaceable Dance Treasure. Genres Novels. Dunham had been invited to stage a new number for the popular, long-running musical revue Pins and Needles 1940, produced by the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union. She expressed a hope that time and the "war for tolerance and democracy" (this was during World War II) would bring a change. Long, Richard A, and Joe Nash. Dunham's mother, Fanny June Dunham (ne Taylor), who was of mixed French-Canadian and Native American heritage. 3 (1992): 24. [7] The family moved to a predominantly white neighborhood in Joliet, Illinois. movement and expression. In Boston, then a bastion of conservatism, the show was banned in 1944 after only one performance. A photographic exhibit honoring her achievements, entitled Kaiso! Throughout her career, Dunham occasionally published articles about her anthropological research (sometimes under the pseudonym of Kaye Dunn) and sometimes lectured on anthropological topics at universities and scholarly societies.[27]. One example of this was studying how dance manifests within Haitian Vodou. She is best known for bringing African and Caribbean dance styles to the US [1]. In 1964, Dunham settled in East St. Louis, and took up the post of artist-in-residence at Southern Illinois University in nearby Edwardsville. Example. Video. 8 Katherine Dunham facts. In 1940, she formed the Katherine Dunham Dance Company, which became the premier facility for training dancers. Glory Van Scott and Jean-Lon Destin were among other former Dunham dancers who remained her lifelong friends. Despite 13 knee surgeries, Ms. Dunham danced professionally for more than . Katherine Dunham was a rebel among rebels. Tropics (choreographed 1937) and Le Jazz Hot (1938) were among the earliest of many works based on her research. [15] It was in a lecture by Redfield that she learned about the relationship between dance and culture, pointing out that Black Americans had retained much of their African heritage in dances. Dunham also received a grant to work with Professor Melville Herskovits of Northwestern University, whose ideas about retention of African culture among African Americans served as a base for her research in the Caribbean. Her mother passed away when Katherine was only 3 years old. "[35] Dunham explains that while she admired the narrative quality of ballet technique, she wanted to develop a movement vocabulary that captured the essence of the Afro-Caribbean dancers she worked with during her travels. Dunham herself was quietly involved in both the Voodoo and Orisa communities of the Caribbean and the United States, in particular with the Lucumi tradition. As Wendy Perron wrote, "Jazz dance, 'fusion,' and the search for our cultural identity all have their antecedents in Dunham's work as a dancer, choreographer, and anthropologist. 1910-2006. Dancers are frequently instructed to place weight on the balls of their feet, lengthen their lumbar and cervical spines, and breathe from the abdomen and not the chest. Later that year she took her troupe to Mexico, where their performances were so popular that they stayed and performed for more than two months. [6] After her mother died, her father left the children with their aunt Lulu on Chicago's South Side. By drawing on a vast, never-utilized trove of archival materials along with oral histories, choreographic analysis, and embodied research, Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora offers new insight about how this remarkable woman built political solidarity through the arts. Name: Mae C. Jemison. ", Examples include: The Ballet in film "Stormy Weather" (Stone 1943) and "Mambo" (Rossen 1954). This initiative drew international publicity to the plight of the Haitian boat-people and U.S. discrimination against them. Dunham accepted a position at Southern Illinois University in East St. Louis in the 1960s. The finale to the first act of this show was Shango, a staged interpretation of a Vodun ritual, which became a permanent part of the company's repertory. In the 1930s, she did fieldwork in the Caribbean and infused her choreography with the cultures . When she was not performing, Dunham and Pratt often visited Haiti for extended stays. "What Dunham gave modern dance was a coherent lexicon of African and Caribbean styles of movementa flexible torso and spine, articulated pelvis and isolation of the limbs, a polyrhythmic strategy of movingwhich she integrated with techniques of ballet and modern dance." Charm Dance from "L'Ag'Ya". It was considered one of the best learning centers of its type at the time. Her fieldwork inspired her innovative interpretations of dance in the Caribbean, South America, and Africa. She had incurred the displeasure of departmental officials when her company performed Southland, a ballet that dramatized the lynching of a black man in the racist American South. "Between Primitivism and Diaspora: The Dance Performances of Josephine Baker, Zora Neale Hurston, and Katherine Dunham". ((Photographer unknown, Courtesy of Missouri History Museum Photograph and Prints collection. Claude Conyers, "Film Choreography by Katherine Dunham, 19391964," in Clark and Johnson. While Dunham was recognized as "unofficially" representing American cultural life in her foreign tours, she was given very little assistance of any kind by the U.S. State Department. informed by new methods of america's most highly regarded. In August she was awarded a bachelor's degree, a Ph.B., bachelor of philosophy, with her principal area of study being social anthropology. The Katherine Dunham Company toured throughout North America in the mid-1940s, performing as well in the racially segregated South. In the mid-1950s, Dunham and her company appeared in three films: Mambo (1954), made in Italy; Die Grosse Starparade (1954), made in Germany; and Msica en la Noche (1955), made in Mexico City. ", Richard Buckle, ballet historian and critic, wrote: "Her company of magnificent dancers and musicians met with the success it has and that herself as explorer, thinker, inventor, organizer, and dancer should have reached a place in the estimation of the world, has done more than a million pamphlets could for the service of her people. Anna Kisselgoff, a dance critic for The New York Times, called Dunham "a major pioneer in Black theatrical dance ahead of her time." Dunham's dance career first began in Chicago when she joined the Little Theater Company of Harper Avenue. [54] After recovering crucial dance epistemologies relevant to people of the African diaspora during her ethnographic research, she applied anthropological knowledge toward developing her own dance pedagogy (Dunham Technique) that worked to reconcile with the legacy of colonization and racism and correct sociocultural injustices. Her the best movie is Casbah. [3] Dunham was an innovator in African-American modern dance as well as a leader in the field of dance anthropology, or ethnochoreology. Birthday : June 22, 1909. Dancer, choreographer, composer and songwriter, educated at the University of Chicago. As a graduate student in anthropology in the mid-1930s, she conducted dance research in the Caribbean. Her dance career was interrupted in 1935 when she received funding from the Rosenwald Foundation which allowed her to travel to Jamaica, Martinique, Trinidad, and Haiti for eighteen months to explore each country's respective dance cultures. The prince was then married to actress Rita Hayworth, and Dunham was now legally married to John Pratt; a quiet ceremony in Las Vegas had taken place earlier in the year. Katherine Dunham, June 22, Katherine Dunham was born to a French -Canadian woman and an African American man in the state of Chicago in America, Her birthday was 22nd June in the year 1909. . Then she traveled to Martinique and to Trinidad and Tobago for short stays, primarily to do an investigation of Shango, the African god who was still considered an important presence in West Indian religious culture. 52 Copy quote. It next moved to the West Coast for an extended run of performances there. She is a celebrity dancer. Her legacy was far-reaching, both in dance and her cultural and social work. By 1957, Dunham was under severe personal strain, which was affecting her health. In 1967 she officially retired, after presenting a final show at the famous Apollo Theater in Harlem, New York. Pratt, who was white, shared Dunham's interests in African-Caribbean cultures and was happy to put his talents in her service. Dunham is still taught at widely recognized dance institutions such as The American Dance Festival and The Ailey School. These experiences provided ample material for the numerous books, articles and short stories Dunham authored. ", "Kaiso! In 1950, while visiting Brazil, Dunham and her group were refused rooms at a first-class hotel in So Paulo, the Hotel Esplanada, frequented by many American businessmen. [28] Strongly founded in her anthropological research in the Caribbean, Dunham technique introduces rhythm as the backbone of various widely known modern dance principles including contraction and release,[29] groundedness, fall and recover,[30] counterbalance, and many more.
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