Katherine Dunham Company

The Katherine Dunham Company was an African American modern dance troupe founded by Katherine Dunham to serve her unique artistic vision. The company would go through several iterations involving various changes of name and personnel over the course of its more than twenty years of existence (approximately 1937-1960). In 1930, while still a student at the University of Chicago, Dunham formed Ballet Nègre, one of the first black ballet companies in the United States. The company would give its first performance at the Beaux Arts Ball in Chicago the following year, but soon disbanded. One of Dunham's dance mentors, Ludmilla Speranzeva, advised Dunham to focus on modern dance and develop her own style. In 1933, Dunham opened her first dance school, the Negro Dance Group, on Chicago's South Side. During that same year, Dunham was cast by Ruth Page in a role for the Chicago premiere of her ballet, La Guiablesse, choreographed to a commissioned score by William Grant Still. The following year, Page decided to revive the work as part of a planned evening of her original choreography to be presented during the Chicago Civic Opera's 1934-1935 season. Occupied with other pieces on the program, Page invited Dunham to restage the work and take over the title role. Dunham cast some of the students from her school, including Talley Beatty, in the Page ballet. She also reconstituted Ballet Nègre, performing with the company in her own pieces, Spanish Dance and Fantasie Nègre at the Chicago World's Fair in 1934.

During 1935-1936, Dunham conducted fieldwork in Jamaica, Martinique, Trinidad, and Haiti. When she returned to Chicago, she received her degree and assembled a small troupe, beginning to create new works that were informed by her studies of Afro-Carribbean dance forms. Dunham and her company went to New York to participate in the program, A Negro Dance Evening, held at the 92nd Street Y on March 7, 1937. In addition to the Dunham company, the roster of performers included Alison Burroughs, Asadata Dafora, Edna Guy, and Clarence Yates. On the first half of the program, Dunham presented a suite of West Indian dances. In the second half, Modern Trends, Dunham presented Tropic Death, which featured Talley Beatty as a fugitive from a lynch mob. Over the next few years, Dunham continued to develop the dance aesthetic and pedagogic approach that would become the Dunham Technique. In January 1938, her company appeared in a Federal Dance Project program, Ballet Fedré, which presented them alongside white dance companies. Ballet Fedré included the premiere of Dunham's full-length work, L'Ag'Ya, which arguably was her first composition to fuse all of the influences of her earlier dance training and studies with the dance forms of the African diaspora she encountered during her fieldwork. That same year, Dunham would be appointed director of the Negro Unit of the Chicago branch of the Federal Theater Project (FTP), staging dances in Run Li'l Chil'lun and The Emperor Jones. During this time, the company continued to evolve and grow. John Pratt (whom Dunham would later marry) would become the company's resident designer. In addition to dancers, the troupe always would include a complement of singers and musicians, such as the Haitian drummer, Papa Augustine. Dunham continued to choreograph and present new pieces for the concert stage, including Barrelhouse (1938) and Bahiana (1939).

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