Top 15 Katherine Dunham Quotes

You know, this isn’t theatre like it used to be.

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.

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.

Frequently producers have partners that they never let the public know about.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I don’t think Ed Sullivan had anything to do with Carib Song.

We have a group of friends of the museum who try to raise, if they can, periodically something to help us. Of course, the main thing about a building like this is its upkeep. It needs central heating and it needs central air conditioning.

I really think that aside from admiring my talent you really admire me as a person and as a woman.

We had maybe the greatest success of any company that I know of in Paris, and after two or three years I wanted to do this same number that we did for PBS, so we did it and Paris had always considered us their darlings.

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.

I am happy to know that my husband regards me as a woman and a person.

Don’t think you are going to go on forever because you are not and begin to plan something that will compensate as you reduce your capacities to leap or turn on this or that or the other, begin thinking of something else.