Made on Stage: Transnational Performance and the Worlds of Katherine Dunham from London to Dakar

Abstract

In April 1966, the American choreographer, dancer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham capped nearly two decades of transnational touring and performance when she joined her old friend, the renowned poet and Senegal’s president Leopold Senghor, as adviser and co-organizer of the First World Festival of Negro Art in Senegal’s capital, Dakar. Dunham and Senghor were a fitting pair to lead the unprecedented gathering of black artists from the United States, Africa and its diaspora in a celebration of black culture. Senghor was a leading exponent of Négritude, the Francophone literary movement that asserted a distinct and universal black expressive culture. Dunham had studied Afro-diasporic dance and culture in Haiti, Jamaica and Trinidad as an anthropology student at the University of Chicago in the 1930s. By the time she joined Senghor in the months before the festival, she had spent more than half of her life bringing Afro-diasporic dance styles to audiences in over 50 countries throughout Europe, South and East Asia, the Americas and Africa.