DUNHAM DANCERS COMPANY

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28261, 26 April 1957, Page 16

DUNHAM DANCERS COMPANY

Interpretation Of

Culture

Katherine Dunham, whose company of dancers, singers and musicians will begin its season in Christchurch today, is not only a choreographer. She is an anthropologist who has studied the dance traditions of the West Indies while she was doing research under two fellowships and earned herself the title of “the world’s greatest exponent of interpretive dancing.”

A bachelor of philosophy, a university lecturer and an authority on the customs of the Caribbean Islands, Miss Dunham was a dancing teacher while she was still at high school, and 10 years later she was maintaining America’s only self-subsidised dance group. The company has made an outstandingly successful tour of Europe and ran for eight months in London. After Paris it went on to Australia, where it appeared in Melbourne and Sydney. Although primitive West Indies dances are the basis of all her dances, Miss Dunham also uses material from the Congo. Brazil, the Argentine, Mexico. Morocco, and the Deep South. The daughter of a Malagache negro father and a French Canadian mother, she has included 23 coloured

dancers in the company’s total of 25. The programme traces the history of the dance from the jungle through folk-dancing and formal ballet to the “Cakewalk” of the 1900’s and modern hot jazz.

The company will visit nine towns in New Zealand in the course of its two-months season.