Katherine Dunham’s Chicago stage: crossing to Caribbean négritude

Abstract

ABSTRACTKatherine Dunham’s 1959 memoir, A Touch of Innocence, offers a remarkable opportunity to understand urban space — a crucial location of modernist experimentation — through the kinesthetic training, experience, and awareness of a dancer. If Dunham was redefining herself, her memoir rewrote urban space through the dancer/choreographer’s kinesthetic awareness of gendered and racialized embodiment. After two decades of stagecraft that was shaped by and participated in Caribbean négritude, Dunham’s memoir experimented with a choreography of urban space to produce a powerful critique of racism and female endangerment. She remapped Chicago through the movement vocabulary she had acquired by the time of her “retreat.” Thus her memoir stages her childhood experience through north-south circuits that become inner circles for other movements: the Great Migration north that reconfigured Chicago’s race relations, and Dunham’s movement south to the Caribbean for alternative dance forms and versions of négritude. Dunham’s memoir offers an opportunity to consider how dance, Chicago, the Caribbean, and black femininity become entangled in complex ways at specific historical locations, giving rise, in this case, to a powerful movement vocabulary and transformative geography.