Abstract:Between 1947 and 1960, choreographer Katherine Dunham spent over 5,000 days in hundreds of cities on six continents. During that time, almost 200 dancers, drummers, and singers traveled with her, performing 166 repertory pieces. Dunham’s expansive work lends itself to digital approaches that illuminate the complex ways history is iterated across bodies, and how the specific questions raised by dance history underpin a visceral approach to the digital humanities.
“…The timeline exemplifies the expanded definition of repertory that the Dunham's Data project adopts to reflect how Dunham's repertory is both embodied and transmitted across generations of performers and is a dynamic entity that changes and adapts according to the needs of the company. In doing this, we go beyond the consideration of repertory as a list of work to include embodied and cultural knowledge that is “entangled with community, whether among those who are co-present or separated in space and time” (Bench and Elswit 2022c, 52) 18 Figure 3.A Timeline of Katherine Dunham's Brazilian-Inspired Repertory from 1937 to 1962.…”
Section: Brazil In the Dunham Imaginarymentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Once dated these programs in turn provide further information for other datasets, including additional entries to Performer Check-In and Repertory. (Bench and Elswit 2022c, 39) Figure 5.Multidirectional Flows between Personnel, Repertory Inspiration, and Places Visited by the Katherine Dunham Dance Company from 1935 to 1962. In chronological order from top to bottom, each colored bubble correlates to a geolocation found in the legend.…”
Section: Brazil In the Dunham Imaginarymentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Once dated these programs in turn provide further information for other datasets, including additional entries to Performer Check-In and Repertory. (Bench and Elswit 2022c, 39)…”
Section: Brazil In the Dunham Imaginarymentioning
confidence: 99%
“…The nature of a Tidalectic approach to data underscores what Harmony Bench and Kate Elswit (2020) recognize as the opportunity for data to shift the scales of analysis most used in critical dance studies from the “privileged example and the signature work” to the “quotidian minutiae” (2020, 308) when working with data in relation to dance history. Following Bench and Elswit, this article demonstrates the possibilities for “digital methods to further dance studies” (2022c, 38) capacity to conduct an expanded historical examination of an artist's oeuvre. On Dunham's Data project, the utilization of what Bench and Elswit term “visceral data analysis” 6 reorientates us to attend to the bodies within the data and “draw out the visceral experiences that underpin and haunt such data, to begin with” (40).…”
This article foregrounds imagination to consider how African diasporic conditions converge with choreographic expression. The analysis “un/maps” dominant understandings of the choreographic process of mid-twentieth-century African American choreographer-anthropologist Katherine Dunham by expanding Kamau E. Brathwaite's (1993) concept of Tidalectics beyond the Caribbean to the wider African diaspora and a distinctly Caribbean comprehension of diasporic imagination. Utilizing datasets and visualizations created by the project, Dunham's Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry, this article traces how the concept of Brazil is imagined and reimagined within Dunham's archive from 1937 to 1962. In doing so, it considers the complex positionality of Dunham as both a pioneering minoritized woman navigating the politics of race, gender, and financial precarity, and someone who yielded their imperial privilege as a US citizen through their career to bring nuance to Dunham's narrative as a canonical dance figure.
“…The timeline exemplifies the expanded definition of repertory that the Dunham's Data project adopts to reflect how Dunham's repertory is both embodied and transmitted across generations of performers and is a dynamic entity that changes and adapts according to the needs of the company. In doing this, we go beyond the consideration of repertory as a list of work to include embodied and cultural knowledge that is “entangled with community, whether among those who are co-present or separated in space and time” (Bench and Elswit 2022c, 52) 18 Figure 3.A Timeline of Katherine Dunham's Brazilian-Inspired Repertory from 1937 to 1962.…”
Section: Brazil In the Dunham Imaginarymentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Once dated these programs in turn provide further information for other datasets, including additional entries to Performer Check-In and Repertory. (Bench and Elswit 2022c, 39) Figure 5.Multidirectional Flows between Personnel, Repertory Inspiration, and Places Visited by the Katherine Dunham Dance Company from 1935 to 1962. In chronological order from top to bottom, each colored bubble correlates to a geolocation found in the legend.…”
Section: Brazil In the Dunham Imaginarymentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Once dated these programs in turn provide further information for other datasets, including additional entries to Performer Check-In and Repertory. (Bench and Elswit 2022c, 39)…”
Section: Brazil In the Dunham Imaginarymentioning
confidence: 99%
“…The nature of a Tidalectic approach to data underscores what Harmony Bench and Kate Elswit (2020) recognize as the opportunity for data to shift the scales of analysis most used in critical dance studies from the “privileged example and the signature work” to the “quotidian minutiae” (2020, 308) when working with data in relation to dance history. Following Bench and Elswit, this article demonstrates the possibilities for “digital methods to further dance studies” (2022c, 38) capacity to conduct an expanded historical examination of an artist's oeuvre. On Dunham's Data project, the utilization of what Bench and Elswit term “visceral data analysis” 6 reorientates us to attend to the bodies within the data and “draw out the visceral experiences that underpin and haunt such data, to begin with” (40).…”
This article foregrounds imagination to consider how African diasporic conditions converge with choreographic expression. The analysis “un/maps” dominant understandings of the choreographic process of mid-twentieth-century African American choreographer-anthropologist Katherine Dunham by expanding Kamau E. Brathwaite's (1993) concept of Tidalectics beyond the Caribbean to the wider African diaspora and a distinctly Caribbean comprehension of diasporic imagination. Utilizing datasets and visualizations created by the project, Dunham's Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry, this article traces how the concept of Brazil is imagined and reimagined within Dunham's archive from 1937 to 1962. In doing so, it considers the complex positionality of Dunham as both a pioneering minoritized woman navigating the politics of race, gender, and financial precarity, and someone who yielded their imperial privilege as a US citizen through their career to bring nuance to Dunham's narrative as a canonical dance figure.
“…This is exemplified in the authors’ concept of “movement on the move,” which grapples with the relentless negative impact Dunham's transitory lifestyle had on her health and well-being. The desire for the data to retain its visceral sense of embodiment led to what Bench and Elswit define as “visceral data,” or data that actively contends with the very real embodied labor that the data represents (2022). Also, worth noting here is the very intentional labor of making all three datasets both publicly available and accessible.…”
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