Education Quote by Katherine Dunham

A quiet flex is buried in Dunham's plainspoken accounting: we built this ourselves, and now the world is coming to collect. She starts with a disarming concession to lineage - "a few master teachers" - just enough humility to signal she understands tradition. Then she pivots to the real point: what matters is the infrastructure she and her community assembled on the ground, without waiting for gatekeepers to anoint it. "Completely local talent development" reads like an argument for cultural self-determination, not just a note about pedagogy.

The subtext is political. Dunham, whose work fused anthropology with dance and centered Afro-Caribbean forms on major stages, is describing a reversal of the usual cultural traffic pattern. Instead of Black and diasporic artists having to migrate toward established power centers for legitimacy, legitimacy is accruing to a place because of sustained practice, teaching, and an ecosystem. That word "local" is doing a lot: it frames the project as rooted, communal, and reproducible - a model, not a miracle.

Then comes the roll call: Chicago, "different places of the country", "even in the world". The escalating geography is rhetorical proof. She doesn't name New York or Paris; she doesn't need to. The point is reach, not rivalry. For a dancer, this is also a statement about the body as an archive: technique travels because it has been made transmissible. Dunham is documenting success, but also staking a claim that serious culture can be grown anywhere when the teaching is intentional and the community is organized.