Katherine Dunham

Katherine Dunham (1909-2006), African American choreographer, dancer, and scholar, an influential leader in black theatrical dance. Her technique emphasized the movement of individual body parts, such as the legs or hips, independently of the rest of the body. See African American Dance.

Born in Chicago, Dunham grew up in Joliet, Illinois. She began dance training in her teens and formed a student company, Ballet Negre, in 1931. Dunham received a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in anthropology from the University of Chicago. Through lectures at the university, she became interested in learning more about African culture and ritual as a way of understanding African American traditions.

In 1936 Dunham received a Julius Rosenwald Foundation fellowship, with which she traveled and studied dance in the West Indies, particularly in Haiti. Her master’s thesis on The Dances of Haiti, completed in 1938, was published in book form in 1983. Dunham, who was especially drawn to Haiti, became initiated into Haiti’s Vodou religion and later in life divided her time between the United States and Haiti.

Dunham’s anthropological study in the West Indies helped establish her distinctive dance vocabulary. She combined movements from Caribbean and Latin American dance with ballet and modern dance techniques. In the late 1930s Dunham moved to New York City and worked for the New York Labor Stage. There she staged dances for musicals including The Emperor Jones, Pins and Needles, and Run, Li’l Chillun. In 1940 she formed a highly acclaimed all-black dance troupe that toured her works in the United States and in Europe. Her dance pieces include L'ag'ya (1938), Shango (1945), and the revues Tropics and Le Jazz Hot (1939), Tropical Revue (1943), and Bal Nègre (Black Dance, 1946). Le Jazz Hot featured social dances of American blacks, including the cakewalk and the strut. Dunham had married Canadian-born designer John Pratt in 1939. While Dunham choreographed revues for her dance troupe, Pratt designed the company’s elaborate sets and costumes.

Dunham also choreographed for, and performed in, motion pictures and Broadway musicals. Her dance sequences appear in Hollywood musicals including Star-Spangled Rhythm (1942), Stormy Weather (1943), and Casbah (1948). Dunham opened the Dunham School of Dance in New York City in 1945. It trained dancers not only in classical ballet and African and Caribbean dance forms, but also in anthropology, drama, and other cultural arts. The school became an influential center of black dance. Dunham also became the first black choreographer at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City when she choreographed a new production of Aïda for the Metropolitan’s 1963-1964 season. In the early 1960s she retired from dancing, and in 1965 she disbanded her company. From 1965 to 1966 Dunham acted as technical cultural adviser to the president and the minister of cultural affairs of Senegal.

In 1967 Dunham went to Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville as an artist in residence and later became a professor. In nearby impoverished East St. Louis, she developed cultural arts programs to teach disadvantaged urban youth. The programs continued under her direction as the Katherine Dunham Centers for Arts and Humanities. Dunham’s autobiography, A Touch of Innocence, appeared in 1959. Her other writings include Katherine Dunham’s Journey to Accompong (1946), about her studies in Jamaica, and Island Possessed (1969), about Haiti and Vodou. Dunham received a Kennedy Center Honors Award in 1983 and the National Medal of Arts in 1989, the highest award given by the U.S. government to people in the arts.