Daily Inspiration Quote by Katherine Dunham

"You know, this isn't theatre like it used to be" lands like a sigh that’s also a warning. Coming from Katherine Dunham, it’s not nostalgia for velvet curtains and better manners; it’s a dancer-choreographer measuring a whole cultural economy that’s shifted under artists’ feet. Dunham built a career proving that movement is research, that Black and Caribbean dance vocabularies are not “exotic flavor” but intellectual and spiritual systems. So when she says theatre isn’t what it used to be, the subtext reads as: the stage has changed its terms of trade, and not in the artist’s favor.

The casual opener - "You know" - does real work. It assumes a shared witness: we both saw the old contract between performer and audience, and we both feel it thinning. That conversational shrug masks a harder critique: theatre as a civic space has been pressured into becoming product. The old model (even with its hierarchies and gatekeeping) promised rehearsal time, risk, and craft. The newer one, Dunham implies, rewards speed, spectacle, marketable identity, and the kind of “authenticity” that can be packaged without honoring its origins.

Context matters: Dunham lived through segregation, Cold War cultural diplomacy, the rise of television, and the institutionalization of “diversity” alongside persistent exploitation. Her line can hold multiple disappointments at once - diminished artistic rigor, shrinking support, and the perennial theft of Black innovation without Black control. It’s not mourning theatre; it’s calling out what theatre has started to forget: how to be accountable to the bodies and histories it puts onstage.