Katherine Dunham and Maya Deren on ritual, modernity, and the African Diaspora

Abstract

In the early 1940s, Katherine Dunham engaged the future experimental film-maker Maya Deren to act as her secretary. In 1946 Deren wrote about the importance of ritual in her films, two of which had been made with dancers from Dunham’s company. The following year she made her first visit to Haiti to study and film voodoo rituals that had been the subject of Miss Dunham’s research. These rituals was then generally seen as a survival from a more ‘primitive’ stage of human development that modern educated people, like Dunham and Deren, were not supposed to believe in. This paper shows that Dunham and Deren each used their experiences of voodoo to define a modern approach to spirituality that was grounded in an Africanist approach to the dancing body that was very different from the idea of disembodied transcendence which runs through the European philosophical tradition.