ABSTRACT
Miss Dunham was not a prolific choreographer. When one examines the list of her choreography compiled by Ruth Beckford (1979), she seems to have made little work after 1947. In her 1962 season in New York she was still dancing pieces she made in Chicago in 1937. By 1943 she had evolved a programme format that she would go on using until she finally disbanded her company in the 1960s. This consisted of dance pieces (and a few songs) arranged in three parts with two intervals. The first part comprised a suite of short dances adapted from the social and religious dances she had studied in the Caribbean and subsequently saw in South America. The middle section generally contained a longer, more serious work, often the three scene ballet L'A8'Ya (1938), or Rites de Passa8e (1941) or, later in the 1950s, Veracruzana (1948). The last section consisted of shorter, more showy pieces based on African American social dances. Seen as a whole, such programmes presented the history and development of Africanderived dancing in the Americas.
