Katherine Dunham was the first choreographer to integrate African American dance with modern dance highlighting the importance of African American culture. She showed the world just how beautiful African American heritage is, but did not stop there. Katherine Dunham influenced the African American culture by fighting her way into the dance community, by developing ethnographic research, and by empowering her Illinois community through the art and outlet of dance. “As an artist, educator, anthropologist, and activist, Katherine Dunham transformed the field of twentieth-century dance” (Das).
Katherine Dunham did not have an easy upbringing. Becoming a dancer, especially as an African American, was extremely difficult and it was even harder to …show more content…
While Dunham was studying anthropology and performing, she developed the idea of ethnographic research to enhance her performances. On her trips dancing she visited many countries like Martinique, Jamaica, Trinidad, and Haiti. While she was in Haiti, she distinguished between sacred and secular dancing by memorizing drumbeats and movements during her hours of recording and observations (Aschenbrenner 82). She observed many dances but one that stood out to her the most was the bamboche dance. This is a courtship dance that attracts the opposite sex. The dancers were recognized for being true artists. “The pleasures individuals experienced and the skills and confidence they developed in dancing, singing, and playing instruments and in constructing instruments and creating costumes taught her lessons she would use in many contexts in later life” (Aschenbrenner 84). These trips to different countries weren’t just to observe dances, but to further herself in becoming an exceptional human being with more cultural knowledge that she could share with the …show more content…
school of Arts and Research in Chicago and the Dunham School in New York. After she disbanded her dance company in 1964, she moved on to becoming a teacher at Southern Illinois University (SIU). Darlene Roy explained that Dunham turned the time of the sensibilities of the black students on campus because there were very few African American professors or artists and residences at that point in time; Dunham gave us a sense of completeness, pride, and sense of owning some portion of that facility. (Living St. Louis). At this time, the community of East St. Louis was going through a period of transition marked by violence and anger. Dunham wanted to help change the community so she involved herself with younger gang members in order to get a sense of what was truly happening in the community. As she gained the trust of young individuals in the East St. Louis area she founded the Performing Arts Training Center (P.A.T.C) at SIU in order to help change the negative environment. Dunham wanted to give young people another outlet to expressing their emotions through dance rather than through violence. “Katherine Dunham provided a roadmap for representing cultural experience and different ways to identify the self through knowledge and understanding not only of the diversity and complexity of the black diaspora, but also of blackness itself” (Cox 134). She taught movements with meaning and correlated them to the movements in
Katherine Dunham did not have an easy upbringing. Becoming a dancer, especially as an African American, was extremely difficult and it was even harder to …show more content…
While Dunham was studying anthropology and performing, she developed the idea of ethnographic research to enhance her performances. On her trips dancing she visited many countries like Martinique, Jamaica, Trinidad, and Haiti. While she was in Haiti, she distinguished between sacred and secular dancing by memorizing drumbeats and movements during her hours of recording and observations (Aschenbrenner 82). She observed many dances but one that stood out to her the most was the bamboche dance. This is a courtship dance that attracts the opposite sex. The dancers were recognized for being true artists. “The pleasures individuals experienced and the skills and confidence they developed in dancing, singing, and playing instruments and in constructing instruments and creating costumes taught her lessons she would use in many contexts in later life” (Aschenbrenner 84). These trips to different countries weren’t just to observe dances, but to further herself in becoming an exceptional human being with more cultural knowledge that she could share with the …show more content…
school of Arts and Research in Chicago and the Dunham School in New York. After she disbanded her dance company in 1964, she moved on to becoming a teacher at Southern Illinois University (SIU). Darlene Roy explained that Dunham turned the time of the sensibilities of the black students on campus because there were very few African American professors or artists and residences at that point in time; Dunham gave us a sense of completeness, pride, and sense of owning some portion of that facility. (Living St. Louis). At this time, the community of East St. Louis was going through a period of transition marked by violence and anger. Dunham wanted to help change the community so she involved herself with younger gang members in order to get a sense of what was truly happening in the community. As she gained the trust of young individuals in the East St. Louis area she founded the Performing Arts Training Center (P.A.T.C) at SIU in order to help change the negative environment. Dunham wanted to give young people another outlet to expressing their emotions through dance rather than through violence. “Katherine Dunham provided a roadmap for representing cultural experience and different ways to identify the self through knowledge and understanding not only of the diversity and complexity of the black diaspora, but also of blackness itself” (Cox 134). She taught movements with meaning and correlated them to the movements in