Katherine Dunham - The HistoryMakers

Katherine Dunham
Matriarch of Black Dance
By Tyler Barnett
Katherine Dunham, one of the most influential dancers and
choreographers of the twentieth century, sat for her interview
with The HistoryMakers on December 17, 2000 at her apartment in
New York City. Dunham is best known for founding the Katherine
Dunham Dance Company. Her incalculable influence on dance
has earned her the moniker the “Matriarch of Black Dance”. A
summary of her interview with Julieanna Richardson follows.
Katherine Dunham was born on June 22, 1909 in Glen Ellyn,
Illinois, which was a very small suburb of Chicago at the time.
Tragedy struck Dunham’s family in her early childhood when
her mother, Fanny June Dunham, died when Katherine was only
three-and-a-half years old. Dunham’s father, Albert Dunham, Sr.,
moved his family into the city so they could be closer to relatives
while he traveled as a clothing salesman. In her interview, Dunham
also describes her brother, Albert Dunham Jr.’s death, which
occurred when she was about twenty-five years old. His death was
particularly hard on Katherine, because “[he] was terribly important
to me in those early school years in Chicago, and I depended on him
in a different way and more, I think, than I would have depended
on a mother and a father.” She goes on to describe how her brother,
who earned a doctorate degree in philosophy from the University
of Chicago, influenced her intellectual development: “He helped
me define dance as I was using it then, which was to bring people
more together, different people, different kinds. And he helped me
realize that anthropology was the only academic study that I would
be interested in at all.”
Dunham’s interest in anthropology blossomed while earning her
bachelor’s degree at the University of Chicago, where she studied
under noted scholars like Robert Redfield, Melville Herskovits,
and Erich Fromm. She excelled in her studies, and earned a Julius
Rosenwald Fellowship. Using funds from the fellowship, Dunham
traveled to the Caribbean, visiting Haiti, Jamaica, and Trinidad
to study rituals and dance. The journey was a life-changing
experience for Dunham forming the basis of her dance philosophy:
“At the time the fascinating thing was how they danced, why they
danced, the form of it, and I was beginning to be vitally interested
in form and function. Now those are the things that seemed to
have preoccupied me when I lived among the people and joined
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