Katherine Dunham: The crossing and [con]fusion of borders by Broadway’s original diasporic dance diva

Abstract

Abstract Although current musical theatre scholarship rarely anthologizes or analyses the work of dancer/choreographer/director Katherine Dunham, she is the prototype of a Broadway dance diva. As such, she subverted marginalizing norms to fully realize and exploit a validated self-expressive model of authoritative and authorial power on both the commercial and concert theatre/dance stages. In the process, Dunham up-ended diva-muse and gendered labour paradigms, confronting and superseding restrictive constructs of gender and normative femininity. As a woman of colour, she used her star power to ‘dance’ blended, diasporic narratives of race and multiculturalism, as well as bridge highly subjective and fluid genre demarcations and art/entertainment binaries in the dance and theatre arenas. Such signature hallmarks – identity, control, transgression, personal comment and singular talent – bespeak a formidable and groundbreaking model of dance divadom.