She is a celebrity dancer. [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. For several years, Dunham's personal assistant and press promoter was Maya Deren, who later also became interested in Vodun and wrote The Divine Horseman: The Voodoo Gods of Haiti (1953). At the recommendation of her mentor Melville Herskovits, PhB'20a Northwestern University anthropologist and African studies expertDunham's calling cards read both "dancer" and . Katherine Dunham is the inventor of the Dunham technique and a renowned dancer and choreographer of African-American descent. 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. She decided to live for a year in relative isolation in Kyoto, Japan, where she worked on writing memoirs of her youth. Dunham herself was quietly involved in both the Voodoo and Orisa communities of the Caribbean and the United States, in particular with the Lucumi tradition. In the 1970s, scholars of Anthropology such as Dell Hymes and William S. Willis began to discuss Anthropology's participation in scientific colonialism. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. Dunham's background as an anthropologist gave the dances of the opera a new authenticity. In 1963 Dunham was commissioned to choreograph Aida at New York's Metropolitan Opera Company, with Leontyne Price in the title role. Fighting for Katherine Dunham's Dream in East St. Louis Retrieved from the Library of Congress, . Dunham, Katherine Mary (1909-2006) By Das, Joanna Dee. She majored in anthropology at the University of Chicago, and after learning that much of Black . Known for her many innovations, Dunham developed a dance pedagogy, later named the Dunham Technique, a style of movement and exercises based in traditional African dances, to support her choreography. During her studies, Dunham attended a lecture on anthropology, where she was introduced to the concept of dance as a cultural symbol. Banks, Ojeya Cruz. About Miss Dunham - Katherine Dunham Centers for Arts and Humanities Dunhams writings, sometimes published under the pseudonym Kaye Dunn, include Katherine Dunhams Journey to Accompong (1946), an account of her anthropological studies in Jamaica; A Touch of Innocence (1959), an autobiography; Island Possessed (1969); and several articles for popular and scholarly journals. Katherine Dunham - Bio, Age, Wiki, Facts and Family - in4fp.com In 1978 Dunham was featured in the PBS special, Divine Drumbeats: Katherine Dunham and Her People, narrated by James Earl Jones, as part of the Dance in America series. [3] She created many all-black dance groups. Dunham was active in human rights causes, and in 1992 she staged a 47-day hunger strike to highlight the plight of Haitian refugees. She choreographed for Broadway stage productions and operaincluding Aida (1963) for the New York Metropolitan Opera. Dunham had one of the most successful dance careers of the 20th century, and directed her own dance company for many years. The finale to the first act of this show was Shango, a staged interpretation of a Vodun ritual, which became a permanent part of the company's repertory. Radcliffe-Brown, Fred Eggan, and many others that she met in and around the University of Chicago. As one of her biographers, Joyce Aschenbrenner, wrote: "anthropology became a life-way"[2] for Dunham. Video. American Anthropologist 122, no. Katherine Dunham always had an interest in dance and anthropology so her main goal in life was to combine them. The PATC teaching staff was made up of former members of Dunham's touring company, as well as local residents. Dancer, anthropologist, social worker, activist, author. 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. Later in the year she opened a cabaret show in Las Vegas, during the first year that the city became a popular entertainment as well as gambling destination. The Katherine Dunham Museum is located at 1005 Pennsylvania Avenue, East St. Louis, Illinois. He lived on 5 January 1931 and passed away on 1 December 1989. Others who attended her school included James Dean, Gregory Peck, Jose Ferrer, Jennifer Jones, Shelley Winters, Sidney Poitier, Shirley MacLaine and Warren Beatty. for the developing one of the the world performed many of her. Admission is $10, or $5 for students and seniors, and hours are by appointment; call 618-875-3636, or 618-618-795-5970 three to five days in advance. This article was most recently revised and updated by, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Katherine-Dunham, The Kennedy Center - Biography of Katherine Dunham, Katherine Dunham - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up). As a result, Dunham would later experience some diplomatic "difficulties" on her tours. In 1987 she received the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award, and was also inducted into the. The family moved to Joliet, Illinois when her father remarried. 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. Katherine Dunham (born June 22, 1909) [1] [2] was an American dancer, choreographer, and anthropologist. The first work, entitled A Touch of Innocence: Memoirs of Childhood, was published in 1959. Katherine Dunham : Dance and the African Diaspora - Google Books Early in 1947 Dunham choreographed the musical play Windy City, which premiered at the Great Northern Theater in Chicago. In 1928, while still an undergraduate, Dunham began to study ballet with Ludmilla Speranzeva, a Russian dancer who had settled in Chicago, after having come to the United States with the Franco-Russian vaudeville troupe Le Thtre de la Chauve-Souris, directed by impresario Nikita Balieff. Her world-renowned modern dance company exposed audiences to the diversity of dance, and her schools brought dance training and education to a variety of populations sharing her passion and commitment to dance as a medium of cultural communication. In 1967, Dunham opened the Performing Arts Training Center (PATC) in East St. Louis in an effort to use the arts to combat poverty and urban unrest. [36] Her classes are described as a safe haven for many and some of her students even attribute their success in life to the structure and artistry of her technical institution. As a choreographer, anthropologist, educator, and activist, Katherine Dunham transformed the field of dance in the twentieth century. Katherine Dunham on Break the FACTS! - YouTube Katherine Mary Dunham, 22 Jun 1909 - 21 May 2006 Exhibition Label Born Glen Ellyn, Illinois One of the founders of the anthropological dance movement, Katherine Dunham distilled Caribbean and African dance elements into modern American choreography. ", Kraut, Anthea, "Between Primitivism and Diaspora: The Dance Performances of, This page was last edited on 12 February 2023, at 22:48. "My job", she said, "is to create a useful legacy. The schools she created helped train such notables as Alvin Ailey and Jerome Robbins in the "Dunham technique." Death . Many of her students, trained in her studios in Chicago and New York City, became prominent in the field of modern 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. Transforming Anthropology 20 (2012): 159168. katherine dunham fun factsaiken county sc register of deeds katherine dunham fun facts In 1947 it was expanded and granted a charter as the Katherine Dunham School of Cultural Arts. Katherine Dunham. Katherine Dunham or the "Matriarch of - Medium Another fact is that it was the sometime home of the pioneering black American dancer Katherine Dunham. It was a venue for Dunham to teach young black dancers about their African heritage. Vintage Dancers You Should Know: Katherine Dunham As celebrities, their voices can have a profound influence on popular culture. In particular, Dunham is a model for the artist as activist. In 1966, she served as a State Department representative for the United States to the first ever World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal. 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. - Pic Credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images. Genres Novels. From the beginning of their association, around 1938, Pratt designed the sets and every costume Dunham ever wore. The highly respected Dance magazine did a feature cover story on Dunham in August 2000 entitled "One-Woman Revolution". She did this for many reasons. Digital Library. Also Known For : . Decolonozing Anthropology: Katherine "the Great" Dunham As this show continued its run at the Windsor Theater, Dunham booked her own company in the theater for a Sunday performance. Her father was of black ancestry, a descendant of slaves from West Africa and Madagascar, while her mother belonged to mixed French-Canadian and Native . [1] She is best known for bringing African and Caribbean dance styles to the US. ", "Kaiso! 10 Facts About Catherine Parr | History Hit She died a month before her 97th birthday.[53]. Based on this success, the entire company was engaged for the 1940 Broadway production Cabin in the Sky, staged by George Balanchine and starring Ethel Waters. 2023 The HistoryMakers. Later Dunham established a second home in Senegal, and she occasionally returned there to scout for talented African musicians and dancers. Example. VV A. Clark and Sara E. Johnson, editors, Joliet Central High School Yearbook, 1928. [54], Six decades before this new wave of anthropological discourse began, Katherine Dunham's work demonstrated anthropology being used as a force for challenging racist and colonial ideologies. On graduating with a bachelors degree in anthropology she undertook field studies in the Caribbean and in Brazil. 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. Katherine Johnson, ne Katherine Coleman, also known as (1939-56) Katherine Goble, (born August 26, 1918, White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, U.S.died February 24, 2020, Newport News, Virginia), American mathematician who calculated and analyzed the flight paths of many spacecraft during her more than three decades with the U.S. space program. 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. 8 Katherine Dunham facts. Birth Country: United States. 2 (2020): 259271. . Marlon Brando frequently dropped in to play the bongo drums, and jazz musician Charles Mingus held regular jam sessions with the drummers. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. Birth Year: 1956. She arranged a fundraising cabaret for a Methodist Church, where she did her first public performance when she was 15 years old. As Wendy Perron wrote, "Jazz dance, 'fusion,' and the search for our cultural identity all have their antecedents in Dunham's work as a dancer, choreographer, and anthropologist. forming a powerful personal. There, he ran a dry cleaning business in a place mostly occupied by white people. In 2000 Katherine Dunham was named America's irreplaceable Dance Treasure. Dunham continued to develop dozens of new productions during this period, and the company met with enthusiastic audiences in every city. [7] The family moved to a predominantly white neighborhood in Joliet, Illinois. [15] 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". She has been called the "matriarch and queen mother of black dance." The impresario Sol Hurok, manager of Dunham's troupe for a time, once had Ms. Dunham's legs insured for $250,000. The restructuring of heavy industry had caused the loss of many working-class jobs, and unemployment was high in the city. Using some ballet vernacular, Dunham incorporates these principles into a set of class exercises she labeled as "processions". Throughout her career, Dunham occasionally published articles about her anthropological research (sometimes under the pseudonym of Kaye Dunn) and sometimes lectured on anthropological topics at universities and scholarly societies.[27]. She has been called the "matriarch and queen mother of black dance."[2]. Such visitors included ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, Robert Redfield, Bronisaw Malinowski, A.R. Katherine Dunham, a world-renowned dancer and choreographer, had big plans for East St. Louis in 1977. Question 2. Leverne Backstrom, president of the board of the Katherine Dunham Centers for Arts and Humanities, still does. 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. Years later, after extensive studies and initiations in Haiti,[21] she became a mambo in the Vodun religion. Her dance career was interrupted in 1935 when she received funding from the Rosenwald Foundation which allowed her to travel to Jamaica, Martinique, Trinidad, and Haiti for eighteen months to explore each country's respective dance cultures. Her father, Albert Millard Dunham, was a descendant of slaves from West Africa and Madagascar. Katherine Dunham PhB'36. Beautiful, Justice, Black. Example. Dunham, Katherine dnm . This is where, in the late 1960s, global dance legend Katherine Dunham put down roots and taught the arts of the African diaspora to local children and teenagers. The Black Tradition in American Modern Dance. "What Dunham gave modern dance was a coherent lexicon of African and Caribbean styles of movementa flexible torso and spine, articulated pelvis and isolation of the limbs, a polyrhythmic strategy of movingwhich she integrated with techniques of ballet and modern dance." Numerous scholars describe Dunham as pivotal to the fields of Dance Education, Applied Anthropology, Humanistic Anthropology, African Diasporic Anthropology and Liberatory Anthropology. Katherine Dunham Timeline | Articles and Essays | Selections from the "Katherine Dunham's Dance as Public Anthropology." Please scroll down to enjoy more supporting materials. Inspiring dancers: Ms Katherine Dunham - (Un)popular Cultures [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. As a student, she studied under anthropologists such as A.R. 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. She had incurred the displeasure of departmental officials when her company performed Southland, a ballet that dramatized the lynching of a black man in the racist American South. Dunham technique is a codified dance training technique developed by Katherine Dunham in the mid 20th century. 47 Copy quote. Dunham created Rara Tonga and Woman with a Cigar at this time, which became well known. Dancer Born in Illinois #12. Educate, entertain, and engage with Factmonster. International Ladies' Garment Workers Union, First Pan-African World Festival of Negro Arts, National Museum of Dance's Mr. & Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney Hall of Fame, "Katherine Dunham | African American dancer, choreographer, and anthropologist", "Timeline: The Katherine Dunham Collection at the Library of Congress (Performing Arts Encyclopedia, The Library of Congress)", "Special Presentation: Katherine Dunham Timeline". [2] Most of Dunham's works previewed many questions essential to anthropology's postmodern turn, such as critiquing understandings of modernity, interpretation, ethnocentrism, and cultural relativism. Birth date: October 17, 1956. [11], During her time in Chicago, Dunham enjoyed holding social gatherings and inviting visitors to her apartment. Dunham accepted a position at Southern Illinois University in East St. Louis in the 1960s. She was born on June 22, 1909 in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, a small suburb of Chicago, to Albert Millard Dunham, a tailor and dry cleaner, and his wife, Fanny June Dunham. Dunham was born in Chicago on June 22, 1909. Actress: Star Spangled Rhythm. New York: Rizzoli, 1989. In recognition of her stance, President Aristide later awarded her a medal of Haiti's highest honor. Katherine Dunham is credited Her dance troupe in venues around. Book. 52 Copy quote. Throughout her distinguished career, Dunham earned numerous honorary doctorates, awards and honors. In my mind, it's the most fascinating thing in the world to learn".[19]. Receiving a post graduate academic fellowship, she went to the Caribbean to study the African diaspora, ethnography and local dance. Katherine Johnson graduated from college at age 18. Dunham's dance career first began in Chicago when she joined the Little Theater Company of Harper Avenue. Her mother passed away when Katherine was only 3 years old. Childhood & Early Life. 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. The company soon embarked on a tour of venues in South America, Europe, and North Africa. movement and expression. Dunham is a ventriloquist comedian and uses seven different puppets in his act, known by his fans as the "suitcase posse." His first Comedy Central Presents special premiered in 2003. Additionally, she was named one of the most influential African American anthropologists. She . A fictional work based on her African experiences, Kasamance: A Fantasy, was published in 1974. As a teenager, she won a scholarship to the Dunham school and later became a dancer with the company, before beginning her successful singing career. Died: May 21, 2006. Chin, Elizabeth. Two Avant-Garde Women Who Took Big Risks in Chicago's Art Scene Dunham had one of the most successful dance careers of the 20th century, and directed her own dance company for many years. Transforming Anthropology 20, no. [13] 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. 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190264871.003.0001, "Dunham Technique: Fall and recovery with body roll", "Katherine Dunham on need for Dunham Technique", "The Negro Problem in a Class Society: 19511960 Brazil", "Katherine Dunham, Dance Icon, Dies at 96", "Candace Award Recipients 19821990, Page 1", "Katherine the Great: 2004 Lifetime Achievement Awardee Katherine Dunham", Katherine Dunham's Dance as Public Anthropology, Katherine Dunham on her anthropological films, Guide to the Photograph Collection on Katherine Dunham, Katherine Dunham's oral history video excerpts, "Katherine Dunham on Overcoming 1940s Racism", Katherine Dunham Centers for Arts and Humanities, Recalling Choreographer and Activist Dunham, "How Katherine Dunham Revealed Black Dance to the World", Katherine Dunham, Dance Pioneer, Dies at 96, "On Stage and Backstage withTalented Katherine Dunham, Master Dance Designer", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Katherine_Dunham&oldid=1139015494, American people of French-Canadian descent, 20th-century African-American politicians, Short description is different from Wikidata, Pages using infobox person with multiple spouses, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, In 1971 she received the Heritage Award from the, In 1983 she was a recipient of one of the highest artistic awards in the United States, the. Katherine Dunham, it includes photographs highlighting the many dimensions of Dunham's life and work. In 1946, Dunham returned to Broadway for a revue entitled Bal Ngre, which received glowing notices from theater and dance critics. Dunham saved the day by arranging for the company to be paid to appear in a German television special, Karibische Rhythmen, after which they returned to the United States. Among Dunham's closest friends and colleagues was Julie Robinson, formerly a performer with the Katherine Dunham Company, and her husband, singer and later political activist Harry Belafonte. This gained international headlines and the embarrassed local police officials quickly released her. Charm Dance from "L'Ag'Ya". Back in the United States she formed an all-black dance troupe, which in 1940 performed her Tropics and Le Jazz . Katherine Dunham, 1909-2006 - WWP The group performed Dunham's Negro Rhapsody at the Chicago Beaux Arts Ball. Biography. Katherine Dunham (1909-2006) is revered as one of the great pillars of American dance history. : Writings by and About Katherine Dunham. There, her father ran a dry-cleaning business.[8]. In the 1930s, she did fieldwork in the Caribbean and infused her choreography with the cultures . Othella Dallas, 93, still teaches Katherine Dunham technique, which she learned from Dunham herself. Jobson, Ryan Cecil. In 1949, Dunham returned from international touring with her company for a brief stay in the United States, where she suffered a temporary nervous breakdown after the premature death of her beloved brother Albert. In 1986 the American Anthropological Association gave her a Distinguished Service Award. They were stranded without money because of bad management by their impresario. Katherine Dunham - Facts, Bio, Favorites, Info, Family - Sticky Facts Birthday : June 22, 1909. Named Marie-Christine Dunham Pratt, she was their only child. Katherine Dunham Birthday & Fun Facts | Kidadl Her work inspired many. Dunham also studied ballet with Mark Turbyfill and Ruth Page, who became prima ballerina of the Chicago Opera. Katherine Dunham's Mark on Jazz Dance | Jazz Dance: A History of the She did not complete the other requirements for that degree, however, as she realized that her professional calling was performance and choreography. Featuring lively Latin American and Caribbean dances, plantation dances, and American social dances, the show was an immediate success. Omissions? 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.
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