Katherine Dunham (1909-2006)

By: Savannah Jones

Published: 2023-05-5

Keywords: Dance, Caribbean, Black, Field Ethnography

Katherine Dunham was an American dancer and anthropologist. She revolutionized the field of ethnographic research pertaining to dance and black culture throughout the 20th century. Dunham not only completed fieldwork and published multiple books, but also founded the Negro Dance Group, one of the only schools for black dancers in the US. Her focus on African dance styles brought forth a new style of dance, named after her. Her work and advocacy led to the creation of the Dunham technique and earned her the title of “the Matriarch of Black Dance.”

Dunham was born in Chicago, IL on 22 June 1909 to the French Fanny June and her African-American father Albert Dunham. The family lived in a white neighborhood and faced discrimination from Fanny June’s side of the family. Dunham documented her childhood memories in her memoir, A Touch of Innocence. Her writing career begins six years later, with Dunham’s first story published in the Brownies Book, the periodical edited by W. E. B. Dubois. Dunham begins studying dance under Ludmila Speranzeva, who would encourage Dunham to focus on modern dance. In college at the University of Chicago, she met and studied under the likes of Zora Neale Hurston, Bronisław Malinowski, and Edward Sapir. She was introduced to the correlation between dance and culture through a lecture by Robert Renfield, her mentor, and supporter during her research. This was her beginning in the field she would help pioneer, ethnocoreology, or as she coined it, ‘Dance Anthropology.’

In 1935, Dunham received a research fellowship from the Julius Rosenwald and Guggenheim Foundations to study dance in Haiti, Jamaica, Martinique, and Trinidad. Journey to Accompong was Dunham’s first published book about her time spent in the Caribbean. During this time, Dunham found herself captivated by voodoo in Haiti; the interest in black spirituality continued later on into 1938, where she led a study of black “cults” in the US for ‘The Negro in Illinois’, a part of the Federal Writers Project. In her return to the States, Dunham finished at the University of Chicago and became one of the first black women to hold a bachelor's degree in Anthropology. Katherine Dunham wrote The Dances of Haiti for her master's thesis but never completed her coursework. Instead, she chose to focus on her dance career.

Dance had always been Dunham’s chosen medium, and she felt that her work could reach a larger audience here instead of strictly in academia. She revived her dance company and acted as both a performer and a choreographer. While working on some of her breakout pieces such as Rara Tonga and Woman with a Cigar, Dunham met her future husband, designer John Pratt. The two produced L’Ag’Ya, a production that drew on dancing Katherine had observed in Martinique. In 1940, Dunham’s company reached a new level of fame, getting hired for the Broadway production of Cabin in the Sky. The show went on a national tour, and the company soon after broke into Hollywood. The company also toured both the US and Canada with Tropical Review, a show that was banned in Boston due to its alleged “provacative nature.” Dunham and her company’s fame spread internationally, and they spent 20 years touring around the world, including Mexico, Asia, and Europe. 

Throughout this time, Dunham and her company were met with intense racial discrimination. At one time, she was offered a studio contract in Hollywood, which she turned down after refusing to replace her darker-skinned dancers. She frequently was denied housing for her dancers and even called out audiences for watching them perform in a segregated theater. The Afonso Arinos law was enacted in response to outcry at Dunham and her dancers being turned away from the Hotel Esplanada in Brazil. While seen as a representative of the US, the state department turned its back on her after the company put on Southland, a ballet about a black man being lynched in the South. She financed and supported herself, and her company, independently, throughout her time directing them.

The Katherine Dunham School of Dance and Theatre opened in 1945 in New York. Students study performing arts such as dance and drama, as well as humanities and cultural studies. Dunham developed a style of modern dance movement based on traditional African dances, referred to as the Dunham Technique, still taught globally. The Performing Arts Training Center was opened in 1967 as a way to use art as a means of helping the urban poverty and unrest in St. Louis. After Martin Luther King’s assassination, the space was opened to those engaging in rioting so they could relieve their frustrations. She was arrested for disorderly conduct when asking a police officer why they were holding student activists, much to the fury of the public.

While her school was running, Katherine moved to Kyoto and worked on her second book, A Touch of Innocence. Island Possessed, published in 1969, is a continuation of her earlier writings about Haiti. Based off of her time in Africa, Dunham also wrote a fictional story, Kasamance. Dunham and Pratt “married” in Mexico in 1941, where interracial relationships were less demonized, and adopted their daughter Marie-Christine eight years later. She spent her personal time with her family and a few close friends, including Julie Robinson and Harry Belafonte. Dunham passed away the month before her 97th birthday on 21 May 2006. In life, Katherine Dunham was awarded multiple honorary doctorate degrees in the arts and humane letters. Her list of awards includes the Kennedy Center Honor for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts (1983), the Distinguished Service Award from the American Anthropological Association (1986), and the President’s Award of the National Council of Culture and Art (1988). Internationally, the Haitian government honored Dunham as the Grand Officer of the Haitian Légion d’Honneur et Merite after she went on a 47-day hunger strike protesting the treatment of Haitian refugees by the US government (1968). In 1986, she received the Southern Cross Award of Honor and Merit from the Government of Brazil.

• Aloff, Mindy, and Robert Gottlieb, eds. Dance in America: A Reader’s Anthology. New York, N.Y: The Library of America, 2018.

• Aschenbrenner, Joyce. Katherine Dunham : Dancing a Life. Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 2002. http://archive.org/details/katherinedunham00joyc.

• Dolinar, Brian, and Writers’ Program of the Work Projects Administration in the State of Illinois, eds. The Negro in Illinois: The WPA Papers. The New Black Studies Series. Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2013.

• Dunham, Katherine. A Touch of Innocence: Memoirs of Childhood. University of Chicago Press ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. https://archive.org/details/touchofinnocence00dunh.

• ———. Island Possessed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0608/93046117-t.html.

• ———. Kasamance: A Fantasy. New York: Odarkai Books, 1974.

• ———. Katherine Dunham’s Journey to Accompong. Journey to Accompong. Westport, Conn.: Negro Universities Press, 1971. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/101138594.

• ———. “Open Letter to Black Theaters.” The Black Scholar 10, no. 10 (1979): 3–6. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41163878.

• Dunham, Katherine, and Patricia Cummings. Dances of Haiti. A CAAS Special Publication. Los Angeles, CA: Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, 1983. https://archive.org/details/dancesofhaiti0000dunh.

• Kaiso! : Writings by and about Katherine Dunham. Madison : University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. http://archive.org/details/kaisowritingsbya0000unse.

• Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. “Katherine Dunham,” April 8, 2016. https://www.alvinailey.org/alvin-ailey-american-dance-theater/katherine-dunham.

• “Katherine Dunham.” In Wikipedia, March 26, 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Katherine_Dunham&oldid=1146782313#cite_note-:6-15.

• “Katherine Dunham · Revolutionary Acts: American, Irish, British, and German Theater of the Twentieth Century · SCRC Virtual Museum at Southern Illinois University’s Morris Library.” Accessed April 27, 2023. https://scrcexhibits.omeka.net/exhibits/show/theater-collections/katherine-dunham.

• Institute for Dunham Technique Certification. “Katherine Dunham Bibiography.” Accessed March 7, 2023. https://www.dunhamcertification.org/new-page.

• Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA. “Search Results for Selections from the Katherine Dunham Collection, Fieldwork, Available Online.” Accessed March 7, 2023. https://www.loc.gov/collections/katherine-dunham/?q=fieldwork.

• “Timeline: The Katherine Dunham Collection at the Library of Congress (Performing Arts Encyclopedia, The Library of Congress).” Accessed April 24, 2023. http://memory.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/html/dunham/dunham-timeline.html.

• Williams, Sonja D. Word Warrior: Richard Durham, Radio, and Freedom. The New Black Studies Series. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wheatonma-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4306061.

Jones, Savannah. 2023. "Katherine Dunham (1909-2006)". CounterCanon Project. 

Publisher

Wheaton College. Department of Anthropology. CounterCanon Project. 

Subject 

Dance, Caribbean, Black, Field Ethnography