Modern dancers

Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 99. Chapters: Twyla Tharp, Isadora Duncan, Katherine Dunham, Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Jean Erdman, Alvin Ailey, James Mitchell, Pierre Dulaine, Yvonne Rainer, José Limón, Pearl Primus, Margaret Morris, Ana Sanchez-Colberg, Lester Horton, Donald McKayle, Bill T. Jones, Evan Burrows Fontaine, Edna Guy, Henning Rübsam, Hanya Holm, Ted Shawn, Paul Taylor, Eiko & Koma, Charles Weidman, Eleanor King, Garth Fagan, Beryl McBurnie, Loie Fuller, Valerie Bettis, Lucinda Childs, Arnie Zane, Astad Deboo, Anna Sokolow, Becky Umeh, Trisha Brown, Bill Cratty, Alwin Nikolais, Deborah Jinza Thayer, Pearl Lang, Sybil Shearer, Mary Wigman, Deborah Hay, Murray Louis, Kurt Jooss, Daniel Nagrin, Johannes Wieland, Carmen De Lavallade, Ailes Gilmour, Marmein Dancers, Jin Xing, Doris Humphrey, Ruth St. Denis, Annabelle Gamson, Andy Blankenbuehler, Christopher Gillis, Sophie Maslow, Gayle Gibbons Madeira, Beverly Schmidt Blossom, Daniel Ezralow, Mark Baldwin, Helen Tamiris, Choi Seung-hee, Christine Dakin, Seán Curran, Nancy Stark Smith, Jane Dudley, Fang-Yi Sheu, May O'Donnell, Simona Lisi, Margie Gillis, Libby Komaiko, Sin Cha Hong, Charles Augins, Syvilla Fort, Martha Mason, Terese Capucilli, Gillian Gregory, Jane Elliott. Excerpt: Katherine Mary Dunham (June 22, 1909 - May 21, 2006) was an American dancer, choreographer, songwriter, author, educator, and activist. Dunham had one of the most successful dance careers in American and European theater of the 20th century and has been called the "Matriarch and Queen Mother of Black Dance". During her heyday in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, she was renowned throughout Europe and Latin America as "that Black woman", and the Washington Post called her "Dance's Katherine the Great". For more than 30 years she maintained the Katherine Dunham Dance Company, the only permanent, self-financing American black dance troupe at that time, and over her long career she choreographed more than 90 individual dances. Dunham was an innovator in African-American modern dance as well as a leader in the field of Dance Anthropology, or Ethno choreology. In 1992, at the age of 82, Katherine Dunham went on a highly publicized 47-day hunger strike to protest what she condemned as the discriminatory U.S. foreign policy against Haitian boat-people. Dunham's father, Albert Millard Dunham was an African-American businessman who owned a dry-cleaning businesses. Albert Dunham traces his ancestry back to African slaves from West Africa and Madagascar. Her mother, Fanny June Taylor was a school teacher and of mixed French-Canadian, Native American and African descent. Dunham became fascinated with dance from a young age, and even before finishing high school she started a private dance school for young black children. At the age of 15, she organized the Blue Moon Cafe, a fund-raising cabaret for Brown's Methodist Church in Joliet, Illinois, where she gave her first public performance. Upon completing Joliet Junior College, she moved to Chicago to join her brother Albert who was attending the University of Chicago. Later she studied both dance and anthropology while an undergraduate and graduate student at the University of Chicago during the 1930s. During this period she became interes