The Collective Memory of the Black Dancing Body: The 2016 Revival of Cabin in the Sky

The 2016 revival of the 1940 “Negro musical” Cabin in the Sky promised to recapture the artistic brilliance of the original production while stripping the show of its racist structures. The success of the revival was due largely to the choreography of Camille A. Brown, who, without a score to follow, was free to reinvent the movement vocabulary. Did this creative freedom contribute to the erasure of Katherine Dunham’s choreographic contributions to the original Cabin in the Sky? Or in the act of reinvention, did Dunham’s work somehow survive?