Opening of "Carib Song"

On December 27, 1940, Katherine Dunham's company opened Carib Song, another original revue exploring the dances and cultural rituals of the Caribbean, in New York City. This production continued the momentum established earlier that year with Tropical Revue, further cementing Dunham's role as a leading interpreter of Afro-Caribbean performance traditions for American audiences.

Carib Song incorporated music, narrative, and dance elements drawn from Dunham's extensive ethnographic research conducted during her 1935-1936 fieldwork in Jamaica, Trinidad, Martinique, and Haiti. The production reflected her ongoing commitment to presenting these traditions with cultural specificity and respect, rather than as generic 'exotic' entertainment.

The show featured Dunham's signature choreographic style, which blended technical ballet vocabulary with the isolations, polyrhythms, and grounded movement qualities characteristic of West African and Caribbean dance forms—a fusion that would later be codified as the influential 'Dunham Technique.'

This production further established the Dunham Company as a fixture of the New York theater scene during the early 1940s, at a time when opportunities for Black-led artistic enterprises to gain such visibility were extremely limited. It reinforced the growing critical and popular recognition of Dunham's unique contribution to American dance.