Katherine Dunham Was A Ground-Breaking Anthropologist, Choreographer, Dancer and Social Activist

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Katherine Dunham (center).

Katherine Dunham (June 22, 1909 – May 21, 2006) was an American dancer, choreographer, author, educator, and social activist. Dunham had one of the most successful dance careers in American and European theater of the 20th century, and directed her own dance company for many years. She has been called the "matriarch and queen mother of black dance".^[1]

^{Katherine Dunham and Her Troupe in Action: Her innovative and distinctive
approach to modern dance became known as The Dunham School.}

During her heyday in the 1940s and 1950s, Dunham was renowned throughout Europe and Latin America and was widely popular in the United States, where the Washington Post called her "dancer Katherine the Great". For almost thirty years she maintained the Katherine Dunham Dance Company, the only self-supported American black dance troupe at that time, and over her long career she choreographed more than ninety individual dances.^[2] Dunham was an innovator in African-American modern dance as well as a leader in the field of dance anthropology, or ethnochoreology.

In 1935, Dunham was awarded travel fellowships from the Julius Rosenwald and Guggenheim foundations to conduct ethnographic study of the dance forms of the Caribbean, especially as manifested in the Vodun of Haiti, a path also followed by fellow anthropology student Zora Neale Hurston. She also received a grant to work with Professor Melville Herskovits of Northwestern University, whose ideas of African retention would serve as a platform for her research in the Caribbean.

Her stay in the Caribbean began in Jamaica, where she went to live several months in the remote Maroon village of Accompong, deep in the mountains of Cockpit Country. (She later wrote a book, Journey to Accompong, describing her experiences there.) Then she traveled on to Martinique and to Trinidad and Tobago for short stays, primarily to do an investigation of Shango, the African god who remained an important presence in West Indian heritage. Early in 1936 she arrived at last in Haiti, where she remained for several months, the first of her many extended stays in that country throughout the rest of her life.

While in Haiti, Dunham investigated Vodun rituals and made extensive notes on her research, particularly on the dance movements of the participants. Years later, after extensive studies and initiations, 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.

SOURCE: Wikipedia - Find out more.