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If you dance, you dance because you have to. Every dancer hurts, you know.

Katherine Dunham

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Katherine Dunham
Age: 96 †
Born: 1909
Born: June 22
Died: 2006
Died: May 23
Activist
Anthropologist
Choreographer
Dancer
Film Actor
Music Pedagogue
Songwriter
Chicago
Illinois
Kaye Dunn
Katherine Mary Dunham
Every
Hurts
Dancer
Dance
Hurt

More quotes by Katherine Dunham

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Haiti itself was also photographed, some of the streets, some of the mountains, rivers, streams, etc. were photographed before talking with me about how I felt about Haiti. Then the camera went to our voodoo temple and saw a serious ceremony, a real ceremony.
Katherine Dunham
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I really think that aside from admiring my talent you really admire me as a person and as a woman.
Katherine Dunham
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Sometimes I have given my husband a manuscript to read that has turned out to have fantastic rave reviews and he'll tell me it is no good. Well, if I didn't know him as well as I know him I would be terribly depressed.
Katherine Dunham
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Without my husband's costumes I wouldn't have known how to accomplish what I saw in my own mind's eyes for choreography. And then seeing our choreography and knowing the background of it I am sure helped my husband a great deal with what he designed for us.
Katherine Dunham
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I certainly feel my career was a great career because it inspired so many many people, literally hundreds of people to follow a new kind of life and to realize that they could make out and advance their own professional and private and social lives.
Katherine Dunham
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I wasn't concerned about the hardships because I always felt I was doing what I had to do, what I wanted to do and what I was destined to do.
Katherine Dunham
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I don't think Ed Sullivan had anything to do with Carib Song.
Katherine Dunham
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Black people should have recognition for themselves and their backgrounds and their relationships with other people in the world and thus lose some of their alienation. This museum has certainly stood for that in this town.
Katherine Dunham
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A creative person has to create. It doesn't really matter what you create. If such a dancer wanted to go out and build the cactus gardens where he could, in Mexico, let him do that, but something that is creative has to go on.
Katherine Dunham
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A creative person has to # create .
Katherine Dunham
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We don't intend to always keep this necessarily African oriented. Originally I had hoped to have African American Indian of this area, and the Appalachian of this area, but at the same time, just as we have the Haitian room, we will always have room for another exhibit.
Katherine Dunham
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I could never live a nonproductive life and I feel that I have lived a productive life as far as I want to in terms of this company that I have for so many years.
Katherine Dunham
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I always believed that if you set out to be successful, then you already were.
Katherine Dunham
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In knowing how to overcome little things, a centimeter at a time, gradually when bigger things come, you're prepared.
Katherine Dunham
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There is an energy within... pure strength... the energy of the person which is put in different forms, in different shapes... once we discover that energy I think that such a thing as dance becomes such a delight because you're moving on a stream that is you but it is even over and beyond you.
Katherine Dunham
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I have actually five honorary degrees.
Katherine Dunham
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So many dancers paint. I used to paint. I started again recently. While I was dancing, I was very busy with my career. Start something else that makes use of your creative ability because if you don't you will die inside as a person.
Katherine Dunham
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For the kind of thing that we were showing, the budget was sufficient. As we were speaking of in Haiti, we had not done that before in exactly this form and we had to have costumes for it.
Katherine Dunham
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My work has been much more Caribbean and eclectic. I am interested in people, and where they come from happens to have fallen within an area of Africa.
Katherine Dunham