Katherine Dunham: Modern Dance Pioneer
Every dancer must possess a hint of the willingness to literally leap into the unknown from time to time. In the midst of the Great Depression in America, a young black woman discovered her heart’s wish to dance as she grew up in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.. When Katherine Dunham (1909-2006) was given permission by professors to combine her academic studies with her love of dance, her perspective on everything changed forever. Her ideals and technique would descend through the ranks of modern dance until it influenced a major segment of what modern dance epitomizes in a contemporary sense as well as define a whole new respect for African American dance.
Dunham’s curiosity about the origins of popular dances would lead her to the Caribbean and the surrounding islands of Jamaica and Haiti where she studied ethnic dance. What she encountered was the deeply rooted source of black dance being performed in America and she explained her interpretations in her 1947 thesis Dances of Haiti, Their Social Organization, Classification, Form and Function. Experiencing the Afro-Cuban rhythms and other dance forms of the West Indies had inflamed her desire to spread the word to the world about where African American dance originated, so she took her show on the road.
Katherine Dunham circa 1956
Dunham proceeded to embrace the existing opportunities of vaudeville, Broadway, and Hollywood in the hopes of breaking the color barriers that held the African American community at bay. She danced for Ruth Page’s ballet company in Chicago, for George Balanchine on Broadway, and performed in Hollywood’s initial attempts at movie musicals. She formed a company and later a school that incorporated all her interests and laid the ground work for generations of African American dancers to excel and know success. At the age of fourteen, modern dance legend Alvin Ailey saw a performance of Dunham’s company in Los Angeles and was so influenced by her stule and technique that the Ailey school continues to teach the Dunham technique today.
Dunham described her style and technique as eclectic. In the arts world that commonly refers to a mix of methods that come together to form something unique. Dunham’s choreography is grounded in many traditional movement forms, such as ballet and jazz, but also expresses the polyrhythmic actions of Afro-Caribbean themes and African movements. The head can be performing one movement to one rhythm while the arms are moving to another rhythm at the same time as a simple example.
In her own words, Dunham predicted that a dancer should have more than the talent for just dance. “Don’t think you are going to go on forever because you are not, and begin to plan something that will compensate as you reduce your capacities to leap or turn on this or that or the other, begin thinking of something else.” Dunham’s education and background as a writer kept her active in the field of dance, education and anthropology. She opened a training center in St. Louis and published several books. In this full spectrum of activity Dunham was able to fuse her lifelong work in the areas of art and social awareness. Her lasting contributions to the world of American dance include laying the groundwork of acceptance for many succeeding generations of African American dancers and an expansive repertory of over 90 dances that explore a variety of themes.