Katherine Dunham
Katherine Mary Dunham was an American dancer, choreographer, anthropologist, and social activist. One of the most renowned modern dance artists of the 20th century, she has been called the "matriarch and queen mother of black dance."
While a student at the University of Chicago, Dunham also performed as a dancer, ran a dance school and earned an early bachelor's degree in anthropology. Receiving a postgraduate academic fellowship, she went to the Caribbean to study the African diaspora, ethnography and local dance. She returned to graduate school and submitted a master's thesis to the anthropology faculty. She did not complete the other requirements for that degree, however, as she realized that her professional calling was performance and choreography.
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. The Washington Post called her "dancer Katherine the Great." For almost 30 years she maintained the Katherine Dunham Dance Company, the only self-supported American black dance troupe at that time. Over her long career, she choreographed more than ninety individual dances. Dunham was an innovator in African-American modern dance as well as a leader in the field of dance anthropology, or ethnochoreology. She also developed the Dunham Technique, a method of movement to support her dance works.
Early life
Katherine Mary Dunham was born on June 22, 1909 in a Chicago hospital. Her father, Albert Millard Dunham, was a descendant of slaves from West Africa and Madagascar. Her mother, Fanny June Dunham, who, according to Dunham's memoir, possessed Indian, French Canadian, English, and probably African ancestry, died when Dunham was four years old. She had an older brother, Albert Jr., with whom she had a close relationship. After her mother died, her father left the children with their aunt Lulu on Chicago's South Side. At the time, the South Side of Chicago was experiencing the effects of the Great Migration where Black southerners attempted to escape the Jim Crow South and poverty. Along with the Great Migration, came White flight and her aunt Lulu's business suffered and ultimately closed as a result. This led to a custody battle over Katherine and her brother, brought on by their maternal relatives. This meant neither of the children was able to settle into a home for a few years. However, after her father remarried, Albert Sr. and his new wife, Annette Poindexter Dunham, took in Katherine and her brother. The family moved to a predominantly white neighborhood in Joliet, Illinois. There, her father ran a dry-cleaning business.Dunham became interested in both writing and dance at a young age. In 1921, a short story she wrote when she was 12 years old, called "Come Back to Arizona", was published in volume 2 of The Brownies' Book.
She graduated from Joliet Central High School in 1928, where she played baseball, tennis, basketball, and track; served as vice-president of the French Club, and was on the yearbook staff. In high school she joined the Terpsichorean Club and began to learn a kind of modern dance based on the ideas of Europeans and . At the age of 15, she organized "The Blue Moon Café", a fundraising cabaret to raise money for Brown's Methodist Church in Joliet, where she gave her first public performance. While still a high school student, she opened a private dance school for young black children.
Academia and anthropology
After completing her studies at Joliet Junior College in 1928, Dunham moved to Chicago to join her brother, Albert, at the University of Chicago.During her time in Chicago, Dunham enjoyed holding social gatherings and inviting visitors to her apartment. Such visitors included ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, Robert Redfield, Bronisław Malinowski, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, Fred Eggan, and many others that she met in and around the University of Chicago.
After noticing that Katherine enjoyed working and socializing with people, her brother suggested that she study Anthropology. University of Chicago's anthropology department was fairly new and the students were still encouraged to learn aspects of sociology, distinguishing it from other anthropology departments in the US that focused almost exclusively on non-Western peoples. The Anthropology department at Chicago in the 1930s and 40s has been described as holistic, interdisciplinary, with a philosophy of liberal humanism, and principles of racial equality and cultural relativity.
Dunham officially joined the department in 1929 as an anthropology major, while studying dances of the African diaspora. As a student, she studied under anthropologists such as A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, Edward Sapir, Melville Herskovits, Lloyd Warner and Bronisław Malinowski. Under their tutelage, she showed great promise in her ethnographic studies of dance. Redfield, Herskovits, and Sapir's contributions to cultural anthropology, exposed Dunham to topics and ideas that inspired her creatively and professionally. 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. 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's relationship with Redfield in particular was highly influential. She wrote that he "opened the floodgates of anthropology" for her. He showed her the connection between dance and social life giving her the momentum to explore a new area of anthropology, which she later termed "Dance Anthropology".
Katherine Dunham received her Bachelor's, Master's, and Doctoral degrees in anthropology from the University of Chicago, and later did an extensive anthropological study, particularly in the Caribbean.
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. One example of this was studying how dance manifests within Haitian Vodou. 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.
After her [|research tour of the Caribbean] in 1935, Dunham returned to Chicago in the late spring of 1936. In August she was awarded a bachelor's degree, a Ph.B., bachelor of philosophy, with her principal area of study being social anthropology. She was one of the first African-American women to attend this college and to earn these degrees. In 1938, using materials collected ethnographic fieldwork, Dunham submitted a thesis, The Dances of Haiti: A Study of Their Material Aspect, Organization, Form, and Function,. to the Department of Anthropology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a master's degree. However, fully aware of her passion for both dance performance, as well as anthropological research, she felt she had to choose between the two. Although Dunham was offered another grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to pursue her academic studies, she chose dance. She did this for many reasons. However, one key reason was that she knew she would be able to reach a broader public through dance, as opposed to the inaccessible institutions of academia. Never completing her required coursework for her graduate degree, she departed for Broadway and Hollywood.
Despite her choosing dance, Dunham often voiced recognition of her debt to the discipline: "without I don't know what I would have done….In anthropology, I learned how to feel about myself in relation to other people…. You can't learn about dances until you learn about people. In my mind, it's the most fascinating thing in the world to learn".
Ethnographic fieldwork
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. 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. Early in 1936, she arrived in Haiti, where she remained for several months, the first of her many extended stays in that country through her life.While in Haiti, Dunham investigated Vodun rituals and made extensive research notes, particularly on the dance movements of the participants. She recorded her findings through ethnographic fieldnotes and by learning dance techniques, music and song, alongside her interlocutors. This style of participant observation research was not yet common within the discipline of anthropology. However, it has now became a common practice within the discipline. She was one of the first researchers in anthropology to use her research of Afro-Haitian dance and culture for remedying racist misrepresentation of African culture in the miseducation of Black Americans. 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.
Years later, after extensive studies and initiations in Haiti, she became a mambo in the Vodun religion. She also became friends with, among others, Dumarsais Estimé, then a high-level politician, who became president of Haiti in 1949. Somewhat later, she assisted him, at considerable risk to her life, when he was persecuted for his progressive policies and sent in exile to Jamaica after a coup d'état.