Katherine Dunham - the "Matriarch of Black Dance".

Hey Dancers! This weeks Friday Feature is Katherine Dunham. She is known for revolutionizing dance in the thirties and forties by incorporating Afro-Caribbean rhythms and movements.

“We weren't pushing Black is beautiful. We just showed it.”

Cite: KDCAH

Dunham was born on June 22,1909 in Chicago, to an African American father and a French Canadian mother. When she was a young girl, Katherine would sing in her Methodist Church as a child and often did performances to raise money for the church. She had never thought about a career in dance. Instead, she followed her family's wish that she become a teacher and followed her brother, to the University of Chicago, where she became one of the first African American women to attend this University and earned bachelor, masters and doctoral degrees in Anthropology. Alongside her studies with Anthropology, she began to study and fall in love with dance. Following graduation, Dunham founded the Negro Dance Group. They performed at the Chicago Beaux Arts Theater in ‘A Negro Rhapsody’, dancing with the Chicago Opera Company, and one of the performances was attended by Mrs. Alfred Rosenwald Stern, who was impressed with her work. Which then led her to invite Dunham to be apart of the Rosenwald Foundation, which offered to finance any study contributing toward her dance career that she cared to name. With the funding from Rosenwald, Dunham spent plenty of time in the Caribbean, most notably Haiti, where she studied local dances. Her training and travelling merged into the idea of the Dunham Technique, which was the first dance technique to incorporate traditional ballet with Caribbean movement and African rituals. She taught dancers (including Eartha Kitt and Alvin Ailey), and created the Katherine Dunham Dance Company, the only self-supported black modern dance troupe of its time. The company toured throughout the U.S., Europe and South America in the 1930s and 40s. Dunham’s first school was in Chicago. In 1944 she rented Caravan Hall, which was Isadora Duncan’s studio in New York, and opened the K.D. school of Arts and Research. In 1945 she opened the famous Dunham School at 220 W 43rd Street in New York where such artists as Marlon Brando and James Dean took classes. She then founded the Katherine Dunham Dance group, which later developed into the famous Katherine Dunham Company. The company was devoted to African-American and Afro-Caribbean dance. Dunham was also a passionate advocate for racial equality. She refused to perform in segregated venues. After she was denied access to the Hotel Esplanada in São Paulo, Brazil in 1950 because she was black, she very publicly criticized the incident. Her actions pressured politicians to pass the Afonso Arinos Law in 1951, which made racial discrimination in public places in Brazil a felony. Although Dunham had passed away long ago in 2006, today, students across the globe still study and admire not only the Dunham Technique, but Katherine herself.

Cite:

- Cooper, Lily. “Who Is Katherine Dunham?” GCU, 15 July 2019, www.gcu.edu/blog/performing-arts-digital-arts/who-katherine-dunham.

- Crowhurst, Anna-Marie. “The True Story of Katherine Dunham, the Woman Who Made Black Dance Mainstream.” Stylist, Stylist, 25 Apr. 2018, www.stylist.co.uk/visible-women/katherine-dunham-technique-dance-choreography-influences-facts-accomplishments-anthropologist/203207.