The Katherine Dunham School of Dance in New York: A Radical Pedagogy of Dissent

• In Event: Embodying Dissent: Transgressive Genealogies of Afro-Diasporan Dance

Abstract

In 1944, African American dancer and choreographer Katherine Dunham opened her School of Dance in the heart of Broadway’s theatre district, challenging the segregated dance landscape of New York. For the next decade, the Dunham School thrived as a pedagogically, artistically, and socially revolutionary institution that attracted students from all over the world. Building upon the work of Elizabeth Chin, who has argued that Dunham Technique alters pedagogical norms of the dance studio, this paper, based on original archival research and oral history with former students, argues that the entire Dunham School was an experimental exercise in a pedagogy of dissent. Through its curriculum, publicity materials, recruiting and hiring methods, and geographic location, the Dunham School radically de-centered Euro-American standards of both artistic and humanistic inquiry. In contrast to other dance schools in New York City in the 1940s (and arguably still today), for which interracialism meant a predominantly-white institution with a handful of black students, the Dunham School placed blackness at the center--not only in terms of the composition of the student body and faculty, but also in terms of its philosophy and pedagogy. African diasporic dance practices formed the core of the curriculum for all students. Dunham emphasized cultural literacy as an integral component of dance education, and conversely also proposed that any solid humanities education had to include an understanding of dance as a fundamental component of the human experience. She placed embodied learning and written learning on an equal plane, dissenting from the Cartesian dualism that renders the body separate from and inferior to the mind.

Through this new vision of what it meant to be an artist and a human being, Dunham created an alternative social world at her school. Students came from all boroughs of New York, from across the United States, from Haiti, Cuba, Ireland, Scotland, Palestine, France, and elsewhere. Not only did they dance together, but also they socialized together after classes and during the monthly “Boule Blanche” parties held late into the evening. To paraphrase Augusto Boal, the Dunham School was a “rehearsal for a revolution” to oppose the racial segregation and repressive Cold War environment that existed outside the building’s walls. When viewed from a twenty-first perspective, Dunham’s language to describe her vision for the school sometimes seems to border on color-blind liberalism, not radicalism. This paper contends, however, that in its historical moment, the Dunham School was a radical pedagogical experiment that deserves recognition for its challenge to the racist and xenophobic social structures of the mid-twentieth century United States.

Author

• Joanna D Das, Washington University In St Louis