Biography
Katherine Dunham was born in Chicago on June 22, 1909 to a mother of French Candian and American Indian heritage and an African American father.1 While she was invested in the arts at a young age through activities at her church, it wasn’t until she had the opportunity to study ballet with Ludmila Speranzeva as an undergraduate student at the University of Chicago that she fell in love with dance. This early passion would evolve into her life’s work.
Dunham began study at the University of Chicago in 1929. While there, she worked under Speranzeva and also explored her increasing interests in the African diaspora. The next year, Dunham formed the Ballet Nègre, one of the first African American ballet companies in the United States, and established her career as a full-time dancer.2 Though Dunham expressed interest in applying for a Rosenwald fellowship in a 1931 letter to her brother, 3 it was not until 1935 that Dunham finally submitted an application upon the recommendations of psychoanalyst Erich Fromm and writer Charles S. Johnson. That year, she applied for funding to support field research on dance traditions in the Caribbean. As her letter writers argued, the unprecedented combination of her intellectual interests and dance talent made Dunham a unique candidate.
This fellowship was ultimately an important turning point for Dunham, as it provided the opportunity to carry out her first major research trip and launched her career as both a dancer and anthropologist. Dunham’s “Plan of Work” for the Rosenwald fellowship expressed the desire to study West Indian dance and work toward a degree under the direction of Dr. Melville Herskovits at Northwestern University. In February 1935, she was awarded $2,400: $500 for study at Northwestern University, and $1,900 for research in the West Indies, some of which was used for the necessary purchases of a motion picture machine and phonographic recording instruments for her anthropological study of dance in Haiti, Jamaica, Martinique, and Trinidad between 1935 and 1936. According to Edwin Embree, then President of the Rosenwald Fund, Dunham’s funds far exceeded those given to other candidates, showing the Committee’s confidence in her promise.4
Dunham's travels not only established her as a renowned dancer of the African diaspora, but also as a talented author. In 1946, directly after her Rosenwald fellowship period, Dunham published Journey to Accompong about her time in Jamaica.5 Dunham also completed her thesis based on her study in the Caribbean, which was published as a book titled Dances of Haiti, the French translation of which was prefaced by renowned French anthropologist Claude-Lévi Strauss.6 Dunham’s fascination with Haiti resulted in another book, Island Possessed (1969), in which she expands on her anthropological research and knowledge of Haitian politics and Vodun.7 The dancer-anthropologist also wrote a series of articles on Martinican dance that were printed in Esquire in 1939, which Joanna Das labels as the “first written pieces of dance ethnography."8
When Dunham returned home from the West Indies, she iterated a renewed passion for education that might take shape as an established school. In a handwritten letter on May 26, 1936, Dunham states her goals and requests a fellowship extension:
“The study of primitive* dancing which was begun as a fellowship from the Julius Rosenwald foundation has proved so fascinating and productive that I am extremely interested in continuing it [in the form of] an established school. I have no doubt that the presentation of native dances on the concert stage will contribute not only to the field of art in general, but particularly to the status of those represented.”9
In the letter, Dunham specifies that she wanted to create a “Negro Ballet” where she could produce authentic productions based on material gathered during her fellowship. Dr. Melville J. Herskovits, Dunham’s early advisor, and the American anthropologist who is credited for opening up the study of the “New World Negro,” supported Dunham's educational goals in his follow-up correspondence with Edwin Embree:
“As I have come to know her better, I have become convinced that we have in her one of those rare persons who combines the finest aesthetic perceptions with an intellectual capacity of the highest order. […] She can do an enormous service to race relations by presenting them in their truest light, and through this contradict most effectively much of the mythology which is current about Negro ceremonialism.”10
In spite of the large sum already allotted to Dunham during her fellowship period in 1935-1936, the Committee awarded her another $600 to fund the school. As a result, she opened the Dunham School of Dance and Theater in Manhattan’s Broadway theater district in 1944 as the first inter-racial ballet in the United States. The school not only allowed her to share the lessons from her fieldwork, but was also singular in its interdisciplinary curriculum in dance, drama, language, philosophy, and anthropology.11
However, for Dunham, the stage had already become a platform through which she educated her audiences. After returning from her fellowship period abroad, Dunham shared her research on the stage through her 1937 program, Tropics: Impressions and Realities. Tropics’ extensive notes expressed her goal to educate her audience on the social and religious roots of the dances performed onstage,12 such as the function of dance in Haitian Vodun ceremonies, which were highlighted in the segments on “‘Zepaules,”and “Yonvalou,” and “Congo Paillette.”13 Viewers are invited to read examples of her program notes in the file below (click to open).
Soon after the debut of Tropics, in 1938 Dunham was appointed as the director of the Negro Unit of the Chicago branch of the Federal Theatre Project, an initiative started by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to support the arts during the Great Depression. In January of that same year, Dunham’s first full-length ballet, L’Ag’ya, premiered at the Federal Theater in Chicago in integrated theaters alongside dances of white choreographers.14 This ballet was inspired by the rural Martinican fighting dance that Dunham discovered during her travels. Set in an 18th-century village, “Dunham's choreography combined ballet, modern dance, and traditional folk and social dance forms such as the habanera (Cuba), the majumba (Brazil), and the mazouk, the béguine, and the ag’ya (Martinique)."
Dunham continued to perform far beyond her Rosenwald fellowship period, and remained deeply invested in dance and in the development of her own Dunham Technique until the early 21st century. Dunham’s performances were groundbreaking because of their diverse depictions of black history and dance in a variety of settings. Consequently, as Herskovits suggests in the remainder of his 1936 letter to Embree, her performances challenged the ideologies that black dance was “instinctive rather than choreographed.” Her genre-breaking style corrected white critics who challenged black dance as either derivative (from European-American forms) or lacking in creativity.15 After studying a variety of Caribbean dances abroad, Dunham’s signature style ultimately became a blend of modern dance training with Afro-Caribbean forms.16
Dunham indeed broke professional barriers by making history as a singular scholar-dancer. Her pioneering comparative religious study of Haitian Vodun, Cuban Santería, Jamaican Obeah, and Brazilian Candomblé made her one of the few women scholars to instigate the exploration of the legacy of slavery in these regions, and perhaps the only one to examine it through the lens of dance.17 But she also paved the way for others. In addition to the Dunham School in Manhattan, she established the Performing Arts Training Center and the Institute for Intercultural Communication in St. Louis, IL.18 She also directly participated in the struggle for racial justice by authoring articles on the unfair treatment of minorities in American culture, which can be found in the “After the Fellowship” portion of this exhibit.
In this exhibit, visitors will find a range of materials that include the performer’s Rosenwald fellowship application, handwritten letters and updates sent to the committee regarding her trip abroad and her path to creating the Dunham School, and several articles and programs related to her performances.
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1. This and more information on Dunham's biography can be found in the Library of Congress's Katherine Dunham Collection: "Katherine Dunham Timeline," Library of Congress, accessed November 12, 2019, https://www.loc.gov/collections/katherine-dunham/articles-and-essays/katherine-dunham-timeline/.↩
2. This troupe quickly came to a halt, but was revived for a brief period in 1934.↩
3. Joanna Das, Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 24-5.↩
4. Letter, Edwin Embree to Katherine Dunham, 9 May 1935, Rosenwald Collection, Box 409, Folder 10, Fisk University.↩
5. Katherine Dunham, Katherine Dunham's Journey to Accompong (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1946).↩
6. Katherine Dunham, Dances of Haiti (Los Angeles: UCLA Center for Afro-American Studies, 1983).↩
7. Katherine Dunham, Island Possessed (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969).↩
8. Das, Katherine Dunham, 35.↩
9. Letter, Katherine Dunham to Edwin Embree, 26 May 1936, Rosenwald Collection, Box 409, Folder 10, Fisk University. Though “primitive” is an outdated adjective, Dunham used this term in this letter and defended this phrasing throughout her life (Das, Katherine Dunham, 5).↩
10. Letter, Melville J. Herskovits to Edwin Embree, 27 May 1936, Rosenwald Collection, Box 409, Folder 10, Fisk University.↩
11. Sara E. Johnson, "Introduction: Diamonds on the Toes of her Feet," in Kaiso! Writings by and about Katherine Dunham, ed. VèVè A. Clark and Sara E. Johnson. (Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconson Press, 2005), 11↩
12. Das, Katherine Dunham, 57.↩
13. "L'Ag'Ya," Library of Congress, accessed November 15 2019, https://www.loc.gov/collections/katherine-dunham/articles-and-essays/notes-on-dunhams-work/lagya.↩
14. Das, Katherine Dunham, 60; Johnson, "Introduction," xvii.↩
15. Das, Katherine Dunham, 56-7.↩
16. Das, Katherine Dunham, 56.↩
17. Johnson, "Introduction," 3.↩
18. Das, Katherine Dunham, 7.↩