Développé: Katherine Dunham’s diasporic dance

Abstract

Abstract This piece focuses on the dance style and methodology developed by Katherine Dunham combining African diasporic dance traditions with Eurocentric dance traditions. Dunham was able to use this new choreographic technique to subvert the white-patriarchal gaze and create a space that forever changed the Broadway stage. In the early 1930s, she travelled to the Caribbean to complete ethnographic research on African-rooted dance styles on the islands. She was then able to bring these back to the United States and slowly integrate them into the choreography for her concert dance piece La’Ag’ya (1938) and her choreography for the hit musicals Pins and Needles (1940) and Cabin in the Sky (1940). Her innovation discovered and exploited the possibilities for subversion or transgression within dance using a hybrid movement style performed by black bodies in order to create an opportunity for an authentic black musical theatre.