Tropics (choreographed 1937) and Le Jazz Hot (1938) were among the earliest of many works based on her research. ", While in Europe, she also influenced hat styles on the continent as well as spring fashion collections, featuring the Dunham line and Caribbean Rhapsody, and the Chiroteque Franaise made a bronze cast of her feet for a museum of important personalities.". [34], According to Dunham, the development of her technique came out of a need for specialized dancers to support her choreographic visions and a greater yearning for technique that "said the things that [she] wanted to say. ", Scholar of the arts Harold Cruse wrote in 1964: "Her early and lifelong search for meaning and artistic values for black people, as well as for all peoples, has motivated, created opportunities for, and launched careers for generations of young black artists Afro-American dance was usually in the avant-garde of modern dance Dunham's entire career spans the period of the emergence of Afro-American dance as a serious art. Example. She has been called the "matriarch and queen mother of black dance." 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. 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. The recipient of numerous awards, Dunham received a Kennedy Center Honor in 1983 and the National Medal of Arts in 1989. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, . In 2000 Katherine Dunham was named America's irreplaceable Dance Treasure. Her dance company was provided with rent-free studio space for three years by an admirer and patron, Lee Shubert; it had an initial enrollment of 350 students. A key reason for this choice was because she knew that through dance, her work would be able to be accessed by a wider array of audiences; more so than if she continued to limit her work within academia. [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. [50] Both Dunham and the prince denied the suggestion. She was the first American dancer to present indigenous forms on a concert stage, the first to sustain a black dance company. She created and performed in works for stage, clubs, and Hollywood films; she started a school and a technique that continue to flourish; she fought unstintingly for racial justice. Called the Matriarch of Black Dance, her groundbreaking repertoire combined innovative interpretations of Caribbean dances, traditional ballet, African rituals and African American rhythms to create the Dunham Technique, which she performed with her dance troupe in venues around the world. "Katherine Dunham: Decolonizing Anthropology through African American Dance Pedagogy." See "Selected Bibliography of Writings by Katherine Dunham" in Clark and Johnson. Many of her students, trained in her studios in Chicago and New York City, became prominent in the field of modern dance. Additionally, she worked closely with Vera Mirova who specialized in "Oriental" dance. She established the Katherine Dunham Centers for Arts and Humanities in East St. Louis to preserve Haitian and African instruments and artifacts from her personal collection. After the tour, in 1945, the Dunham company appeared in the short-lived Blue Holiday at the Belasco Theater in New York, and in the more successful Carib Song at the Adelphi Theatre. 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. Legendary dancer, choreographer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham was born June 22, 1909, to an African American father and French-Canadian mother who died when she was young. Video. Classes are led by Ruby Streate, director of dance and education and artistic director of the Katherine Dunham Children's Workshop. Transforming Anthropology 20 (2012): 159168. Chin, Elizabeth. Pas de Deux from "L'Ag'Ya". Kantherine Dunham passed away of natural causes on May 21, 2006, one month before her 97th birthday. Dun ham had one of the most successful dance careers in African-American and European theater of the 20th century, and directed her own dance company for many years. Tune in & learn about the inception of. "The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn: Sociocultural Anthropology in 2019." She did not complete the other requirements for that degree, however, as she realized that her professional calling was performance and choreography. 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]. Dunham was exposed to sacred ritual dances performed by people on the islands of Haiti and Jamaica. Katherine Dunham, it includes photographs highlighting the many dimensions of Dunham's life and work. Katherine Dunham Quotes On Positivity. During these years, the Dunham company appeared in some 33 countries in Europe, North Africa, South America, Australia, and East Asia. Katherine Dunham got an early bachelor's degree in anthropology as a student at the University of Chicago. American Anthropologist 122, no. Updates? Dunham technique is a codified dance training technique developed by Katherine Dunham in the mid 20th century. Her mother passed away when Katherine was only 3 years old. "Her mastery of body movement was considered 'phenomenal.' In 1992, at age 83, Dunham went on a highly publicized hunger strike to protest the discriminatory U.S. foreign policy against Haitian boat-people. As an African American woman, she broke barriers of race and gender, most notably as the founder of an important dance company that toured the United States, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Australia for several decades. A highlight of Dunham's later career was the invitation from New York's Metropolitan Opera to stage dances for a new production of Aida, starring soprano Leontyne Price. She also choreographed and appeared in Broadway musicals, operas and the film Cabin in the Sky. Video. Ruth Page had written a scenario and choreographed La Guiablesse ("The Devil Woman"), based on a Martinican folk tale in Lafcadio Hearn's Two Years in the French West Indies. The Dunham company's international tours ended in Vienna in 1960. Born in Glen Ellyn, IL #6. However, it has now became a common practice within the discipline. 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. Our site is COPPA and kidSAFE-certified, so you can rest assured it's a safe place for kids . In the 1970s, scholars of Anthropology such as Dell Hymes and William S. Willis began to discuss Anthropology's participation in scientific colonialism. The committee voted unanimously to award $2,400 (more than $40,000 in today's money) to support her fieldwork in the Caribbean. Fun facts. Her work helped send astronauts to the . [60], However, this decision did not keep her from engaging with and highly influencing the discipline for the rest of her life and beyond. According to the Katherine Dunham Centers for Arts and Humanities, Dunham never thought she'd have a career in dance, although she did study with ballerina and choreographer Ruth Page, among others. Omissions? Born in 1512 to Sir Thomas Parr, lord of the manor of Kendal in Westmorland, and Maud Green, an heiress and courtier, Catherine belonged to a family of substantial influence in the north. The living Dunham tradition has persisted. [14] For example, she was highly influenced both by Sapir's viewpoint on culture being made up of rituals, beliefs, customs and artforms, and by Herkovits' and Redfield's studies highlighting links between African and African American cultural expression. Dancer, choreographer, composer and songwriter, educated at the University of Chicago. A photographic exhibit honoring her achievements, entitled Kaiso! Luminaries like Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey and Katherine Dunham began to shape and define what this new genre of dance would be. On February 22, 2022, Selkirk will offer a unique, one-lot auction titled, Divine Technique: Katherine Dunham Ephemera And Documents. ", Black writer Arthur Todd described her as "one of our national treasures". 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 felt it was necessary to use the knowledge she gained in her research to acknowledge that Africanist esthetics are significant to the cultural equation in American dance. One example of this was studying how dance manifests within Haitian Vodou. At the height of her career in the 1940s and 1950s, Dunham was renowned throughout Europe and Latin America and was widely popular in the United States. In 1964, Dunham settled in East St. Louis, and took up the post of artist-in-residence at Southern Illinois University in nearby Edwardsville. [15], In 1935, Dunham was awarded travel fellowships from the Julius Rosenwald and Guggenheim foundations to conduct ethnographic fieldwork in Haiti, Jamaica, Martinique, and Trinidad studying the dance forms of the Caribbean. Birth Year: 1956. Dunham continued to develop dozens of new productions during this period, and the company met with enthusiastic audiences in every city. The schools she created helped train such notables as Alvin Ailey and Jerome Robbins in the "Dunham technique." Death . The troupe performed a suite of West Indian dances in the first half of the program and a ballet entitled Tropic Death, with Talley Beatty, in the second half. At this time Dunham first became associated with designer John Pratt, whom she later married. With choreography characterized by exotic sexuality, both became signature works in the Dunham repertory. However, after her father remarried, Albert Sr. and his new wife, Annette Poindexter Dunham, took in Katherine and her brother. Her popular books are Island Possessed (1969), Touch of Innocence (1959), Dances of Haiti (1983), Kaiso! About that time Dunham met and began to work with John Thomas Pratt, a Canadian who had become one of America's most renowned costume and theatrical set designers. 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 . Check out this biography to know about his childhood, family life, achievements and fun facts about him. Her field work in the Caribbean began in Jamaica, where she lived for several months in the remote Maroon village of Accompong, deep in the mountains of Cockpit Country. Using some ballet vernacular, Dunham incorporates these principles into a set of class exercises she labeled as "processions". Writings by and about Katherine Dunham" , Katherine Dunham, 2005. 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." There, her father ran a dry-cleaning business.[8]. A continuation based on her experiences in Haiti, Island Possessed, was published in 1969. The following year, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson nominated Dunham to be technical cultural advisera sort of cultural ambassadorto the government of Senegal in West Africa. Although it was well received by the audience, local censors feared that the revealing costumes and provocative dances might compromise public morals. Katherine Mary Dunham was born in Chicago in 1909. Its premiere performance on December 9, 1950, at the Teatro Municipal in Santiago, Chile,[39][40] generated considerable public interest in the early months of 1951. In 1967 she officially retired, after presenting a final show at the famous Apollo Theater in Harlem, New York. Katherine Dunham predated, pioneered, and demonstrated new ways of doing and envisioning Anthropology six decades ahead of the discipline. In 1931, at the age of 21, Dunham formed a group called Ballets Ngres, one of the first black ballet companies in the United States. Birth date: October 17, 1956. 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. He continued as her artistic collaborator until his death in 1986. In September 1943, under the management of the impresario Sol Hurok, her troupe opened in Tropical Review at the Martin Beck Theater. There she met John Pratt, an artist and designer and they got married in 1941 until his death in 1986. Short Biography. Stormy Weather is a 1943 American musical film produced and released by 20th Century Fox, adapted by Frederick J. Jackson, Ted Koehler and H.S. After Mexico, Dunham began touring in Europe, where she was an immediate sensation. Back in the United States she formed an all-black dance troupe, which in 1940 performed her Tropics and Le Jazz . Dunham was always a formidable advocate for racial equality, boycotting segregated venues in the United States and using her performances to highlight discrimination. The group performed Dunham's Negro Rhapsody at the Chicago Beaux Arts Ball. However, fully aware of her passion for both dance performance, as well as anthropological research, she felt she had to choose between the two. In 1948, she opened A Caribbean Rhapsody, first at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London, and then took it to the Thtre des Champs-lyses in Paris. 7 Katherine Dunham facts. At the age of 82, Dunham went on a hunger strike in . Pratt, who was white, shared Dunham's interests in African-Caribbean cultures and was happy to put his talents in her service. Dunham had one of the most successful dance careers in American and European theater of the 20th century, and directed her own dance company for many years. You dance because you have to. 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. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. Even in retirement Dunham continued to choreograph: one of her major works was directing the premiere full, posthumous production Scott Joplin's opera Treemonisha in 1972, a joint production of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and the Morehouse College chorus in Atlanta, conducted by Robert Shaw.
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