The Career Of Katherine Dunham Theatre Essay

The rush Of Katherine Dunham Theatre EssayKatherine Dunham modern saltationr and choreographer, born in Glen Ellyn, Illinois unite States of America, she were completed her study at the Chicago University and went on to earn a higher degree in anthropology. t everyy to Darlene, (2006) turn to the side of bounce she began her first school in Chicago in 1931, when she becoming move director for the works progress administrations project of Chicago theatre. A cheap performer, she was best known for her choreography in such musicals as confine in the sky 1940, and for action pictures, notably Stormy Weather 1943. fit to Barbara, (2000) Dunham study a simply the trip the light fantastic forms in the Caribbean, especially Haiti where she lived for many years, and is impute with bringing Caribbean and African determines to a European dominated move world. Her companionship trave direct globally in the 1940s-60s, and she consistently denied execute at unintegrated venues. c orrespond to Joyce, (2002) in 1967 she readyed the Performing Arts Training Center for inter-city jr. in East St Louis, IL, and in 1992 went on a 47-day appetite scoop up to protestation in resistance to the American banishment of Haitian refugees. Her honours degree incorporated the Presidential Medal of the Arts (1989) and the Albert Schweitzer Prize.IntroductionDunham is perhaps approximately well known, however, for her unique blending of anthropology and leaping. harmonize to Jessie, (2002) Dunham challenged mainstream academic circles by apply her anthropology not only for articles and books, but to a fault as a gas for her own artistic dance productions, which heavily drew on the dance forms and pagan rituals she witnessed and documented d championness total immersion in the cultures she observed. Dunham traveled the world with these productions, bringing African culture, through movements, cycles and sounds, to the worlds consciousness. This hybrid of anthropology and dance tardilyr on morphed into what is today known as the Dunham technique, a special type of dance training utilizing movements witnessed in her field work. gibe to Darlene, (2006) Dunham technique is today studied and practiced around the world. After Dunham retired from leaping, she moved to East St. Louis, a blighted, predominantly African-American city which she hoped to revitalize through establishing a vibrant heathenish center. Dunham established there an interactive museum and a dance institute (which continues to memorize her technique to students from around the world).Research objectivesDunham desired to experiences this academy the base of passable larger cultural institution that world bring the East St. Louis corporation with for each one different. Just as surely as Haiti is overcome through the character of vaudun the island possessed African American Katherine Dunham when she first went there in the year of 1936 for the purpose of study dance and ri tual. consort to Joyce, (2002) in her book, Dunham discloses how her anthropological question, her work in dance, and her fasci body politic for the people and cults of Haiti worked their trance, catapulting her into experiences that she was often lucky to suffer had. According to Richard and Joe, (2008) Dunham explain how the island came to be possessed by the deities of voodoo and other African religions, as well as by the deep yr distributions, beginicularly within mulattos and blacks, and the political strife remain enough in evidence at present. Full of fl ar and suspense, Island Possessed is also a pioneering work in the anthropology of dance and a captivating document on Haitian beliefs and politics.DiscussionThe book Island Possessed,details Ms. Dunhams experiences and sentiments of her adopted homeland, from the year 1936 to the late 1960s, and even describes her final initiation into the Vaudoun (Voodoo) religion of the half-island. According to Patrick, (2006) she sp eaks Haitian Creole fluently, she has owned a beautiful 18th century Haitian estate, hearthstone LeClerc for decades, and, in the early 1990s, she put her spirit on the line and went on an extended hunger strike, when President Aristide was overthrown and forced to leave the country. According to Jane, (2007) Ms. Dunham also adopted a young girl from the French West Indies island of Martinique, sand in the 1950s, as further demonstration of her love and commitment to the Diaspora.Introduced to playing fieldOne of those baby-sitters, Clara Dunham, had come to Chicago with her daughter, Irene, hoping to break into show business. They and other unpaid performers began rehearsing a musical/ theatrical performance program in the basement of their flat building, and Dunham would watch. Although the program wasnt a success, it provided Dunham with her first taste of show business. According to Darlene, (2006) Dunham and her associate were very fond of their Aunt Lulu. However, becaus e she was experiencing financial difficulties, a judge granted temporary custody of the children to their half-sister Fanny June Weir, and ordered that the children be returned to their father as soon as he could prove that he could take mission of them.Katherine DunhamKatherine Dunham was born June 22, 1909, in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, in DuPage County, and died May 21, 2006 in New York City. Although one of the most(prenominal) important artists (and scholars) of her time, she the Great Compromiser largely unknown outside move and African-American studies. According to Darlene, (2006) Sara E. Johnson supposed that the breadth of Dunhams accomplishments is perhaps one score for the underappreciation of her work. Dunham worked so hard on so many different things that she remains hard to classify. She almost single-handedly created a genuine artistic and cultural appreciation for the unique aspects of African dance, especially as manifested in African diaspora cultures. According to Joyce, (2002) Dunham was also a serious anthropologist that began her c beer with ground-breaking studies carried out in Jamaica and Haiti as a student at the University of Chicago. Finally, she was a tireless advocate, who led to a brief arrest during race riots in East St. Louis and a 47 day hunger-strike carried out at the age of 82 against US discrimination against Haitian refugees.Dunhams Artistic Academic BackgroundThis process was, in fact, a remaking of memory through motion. As Hamera reinforces, the practice of he complaisant work of aesthetics is especially communal and corporeal, and where corporeality and sociality are remade as surely as formal event is produced. According to Jessie, (2002) in this sense, Afro-Caribbean culture and sociality voyaged across the Atlantic to the rest of the Americas, Europe, and Asian-wherever the Katherine Dunham Dance Company performed. According to Ruth, (2009) Dunhams Research-to-Performance Method Armed with these researched da nces of the black Atlantic and an reasonableness of their Functional social contexts, Dunhams dance theater became a prime laboratory where Afro- Caribbean cultures could migrate through the transaction of her choreography and through the personalities of her individual dancers in the act of performing the Dunham oeuvre.Uncovering Danced MemoryKatherine Dunhams earliest written ethnography provides ample create of her prescience as a fieldworker and scholar in uncovering an superannuated African dance surviving in the Caribbean on the island of Jamaica. According to Joyce, (2002) in her fieldwork puted in Journey to Accompong, she utilized a functionalist theoretical signifier by recording the various social institutions in relationship to each other in the village of Accompong. Kinship, ownership patterns, religion, work group organizations, habilitate and material culture, age, gender (unusual for her time), and social interaction were the sequential subject matters of he r chapters. Yet, as she reveals, she had come there to study and take part in the dances. According to Naima, (2001) Accompong was and is one of the desolate villages in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica, having been established by run-a-away slaves from the Spanish as early as 1650 and posterior the English rulers in the 1690s of these maroons the Coromantees, an Akan group from the West African G antiquated Coast made up the largest ethnical group. They fought many battles with the British and were finally given their independence by England in a treaty signed in 1738. Thus, as a nation within a nation, the maroons of the cockpit region of the Blue Mountains had sufficiently maintained their ship canal of life for two centuries by the time that Katherine Dunham had arrived to study their dances and ways of life. imprisonment and colonialism had taken its toll even among those so long unaffectionate from European influence. But Dunham was determined to unearth a vital expressive pa rt of their successful victory and independence against the British. She would soon discover this same phenomenon among the petwo dances among the Vodou practitioners in Haiti against their French captors. Through her intense engagement of the participatory insider role with the dancing maroons, she gained historical insights that were embedded within the dancing act itself According to Richard and Joe, (2008) The state of struggle dances are danced by men and women. Their songs are in lusty Koromantee, and from somewhere a woman has procured a rattle and shakes this in accompaniment to Ba Weeyums. Some of the men turn over sticks in the air, and the women tear off their handkerchiefs and wave them on high as they dance. According to Patrick, (2006) few of these turns, and we are separated in a melee of leaping, shouting warriors a moment later we are bush fighting, crouching down and advancing in line to coming an imaginary enemy with many feints, swerves and much pantomime. At one confront of the dance Miss May and I are face to face, she no longer is a duppy, but a maroon woman of old days, working the men up to a pitch where they will decide into the cockpit and exterminate one of his majestys red-coated platoons.Afro -Jamaican dances, such as the Coromantee war dance, represent in a direct way the concept of dance itself as having rhetorical voice. As Judith Hamera explains, performance, including dance, is enmeshed in language, in reading, writing, rhetoric, and in voice. Dunham implicitly understood the movement rhetoric of the Coromantee dance and the relationship between its performance and the writing of her ethnographic experience in Jamaica. According to Richard and Joe, (2008) Dunhams willingness to engage the maroon dances on the cultures own terms, treating dance as another social system, allowed her a unique view into the role of the nearly forgotten Koromantee dance as a part of the maroons hard won battle for independence from the Briti sh. According to Joyce, (2002) this is a prime example of dances unique rhetorical voice-what dance anthropologist Yvonne Daniel calls bodied knowledge Community members are in an open classroom with dance and music behavior.These sorts of knowledges are on display as community management for social cohesion and cosmic balance, Participants learn from observation, witnessing, modeling and active participation. According to Ira and Faye, (2009) Dunhams implicit understanding of this embodied knowledge established her philosophic foundation that would serve her use of dance and the body, according to Clark, as a repository of memory. Moreover, she trusted her choreographic acumen to represent her understanding of her research, which in the Jamaican case, had been unearthed and cajoled from the continuing, yet reluctant, milieux de mmoire lingering in Accompong.According to Richard and Joe, (2008) in her active participation, Dunham was, thus, one of the first to demonstrate the con tinuity of particularised West African dances that served enslaved Africans with similar purposes in the colonial New World. It is solid that this discovery was cognized in the act of dancing, through corporeal immersion in the communal dances of the people. We realize from todays contemporary scholarship the importance of Dunhams early trans-Atlantic performance connections. According to Joyce, (2002) Africanist anthropologist Margaret Drewal revealed in the 1990s that African-based performance. Primary site for the production of knowledge, where philosophy is enacted, and where tenfold and often simultaneous discourses are employed. As I cause said elsewhere, dance, for African peoples, whether on the continent or in the diaspora, is a means of enacting immediate social context, history, and indeed philosophical worldview. Dunham understood these multiple strategies embedded within Africanist performance, such as in her treasured Koromantee war dance.Honouring Katherine Dunha m as the progenitor of African American dance would be take and disrespect the legacy of other African Americans who contributed their own particular ways of knowing movement. According to Jane, (2007) it introduced Bannerman to Pearl Primus. Both Dunham and Primus were pioneering giants in the American dance pantheon with different ways of making dance. Since the create by mental act was ultimately going to tittle-tattle on the dance practices of African Americans, these two pioneers had to be discussed. According to Ruth, (2009) stack away life stories and reflections on movement and descriptions of individual interactions with works of Dunham and Primus would speak of the form that is American dance making than the celebration of any one artist.Dunhams represent Caribbean Dances of the Black AtlanticDunham perceived her form of dance-theater as intercultural communication. For example, when international audiences viewed her 1948 ballet Naningo, she was allowing non-Cubans to interact with one of the ritualized ways in which male Afro-Cubans had retained their cosmogenic confidential rituals perpetuated from the Ejagham people of todays Cross-River area of Nigeria. According to Jessie, (2002) Naningo, as an all-male ballet was a fusion of balletic athleticism, Dunham technique (particularly rhythmic torso isolations and the use of the pelvic arch as the source for extending the legs), and a recontextualization of the movements of the Cuban male secret company called Abakua. Through program notes, the exuberant virtuosity of the dance, and the cryptic Abakua symbolic movements, she transported European audiences to secret enclaves in Cuba that only initiated Abakua members could have previously viewed.She also cast one of her Cuban dancers in the role of a traditional Abakua figure that drums remote center throughout the entire ballet, as an authentic gaze observance over her appropriated fusion style. According to Barbara, (2000) as the curtain closes, after all the Dunham technique dancers have left, the ballet ends with that figure moving across the stage in enigmatic movement phrases representative of the symbolic language of the Abakua Cuban male society. Secret society rituals, restaged in a secular theatrical setting is not a substitute for being there, but it does move an underlying social strategy of male survivors of the Atlantic slave trade, as well as a vision of sacred danced symbolism in that survival strategy. According to Ruth, (2009) Dunham company performed Naningo for people internationally who had no judgement that the Abakua society even existed. In the adept hands of knowledgeable researchers standardized Katherine Dunham, performance becomes another mode of bridging the cultural gaps that make cross-cultural understanding such a difficult goal to reach.ConclusionIn conclusion, life of the Dunham and career are miraculous, and although she was not alone, Dunham is perhaps the best known and most in fluential pioneer of black dance. She wanted to make a heyday that African-American and African-Caribbean styles are related and powerful components of dance in America. Performed imagined migration is underpinned by her specific artistic intent and projected audience reception. There are many ways to present dance on radio but a visual image is preferable if the discussion concerns elements of a form. The design makers can then include descriptions of how the shaping of arms and legs display rhythm or portray expression and how contours of the torso fulfill the dancers intended personification. intercommunicate though is an excellent tool to stir the minds eye especially if the oral communication relate life stories and movement experiences in a descriptive way. Bannerman contacted me to research and be the presenter for the 45-minute programme You Dance Because You Have To aired on 21 September 2003. Interested in emerging American dance forms producer, Richard Bannerman submi tted a proposal to BBC Radio 3 to make a documentary film on Katherine Dunham. Bannerman knew Radio 3 wanted to explore new territories in dance and Katherine Dunhams story was relatively unknown in Britain. Bannerman also found the repertory of The Alvin Ailey Dance Company inspiring and speculated that Katherine Dunhams life would be a good starting point to discuss in a habitual way, the dance practices of African Americans. In our preliminary meeting it became clear to me that our programme had to respect the diversity of African American practices.