Interactive Chord Diagram of Katherine Dunham’s Dancers, Drummers, and Singers, 1947-60

Antonio Jimenez Mavillard created this chord diagram to visualize a dataset manually curated by Harmony Bench and Kate Elswit for Dunham’s Data. This visualization makes it possible to interactively examine the connections among the dancers, drummers, and singers in Dunham’s employ between 1947 and 1960. Doing so, users can see who shared space and time together and therefore have a sense of the transmission of embodied knowledge across hundreds of performers. Coloring represents the level of connectedness among generational ‘communities’ within Dunham’s company.