How do we tell our stories? Of course we speak them, as Jane Finnegan Pearson does in “Stepping Out from Behind the Kickline” in the Talking to Us feature in this issue of Voices. But Voices also demonstrates that we have multiple ways of conveying our memories and our accounts of ourselves, multiple means of communicating what we have learned from the past.

A voice from 100 years ago tells us about Julia Dent’s courtship by Ulysses Grant 60 years earlier, so that we are essentially hearing a story down some 16 decades. We vicariously escape from Nazi Germany through Thomas Singer’s harrowing tale. We listen to community stories told through the art of cinema. Even the History Museum’s collection of fire marks talks to us. These obsolete insignia “told” which buildings were insured in case of fire; they still speak to us of another time and place, and of concerns, like public safety, that have not diminished in our own era.

Oil painting of Katherine Dunham by Werner Philipp, 1943, recently purchased by the Missouri History Museum.

But the voice I keep coming back to is Miss Jane Finnegan’s—the dancer’s—for I have been thinking about dance as a type of voice. At the History Museum we are preparing for a major exhibition on the life and work of our region’s own Katherine Dunham. The late Miss Dunham was an articulate and often outspoken woman, but her primary voice was in the dance. In her performance and in her teaching she expressed not only her own story but also the life and culture of ancient peoples. She told her students of the universal rhythms, the dignity, and the treasures of cultures not necessarily their own, and she taught them to express those values in their own lives. I am privileged to have heard Katherine Dunham’s actual voice in her later years, as I personally guided her through the museum’s collections. “I feel that I am hearing a hundred voices from the past,” she told me as we went through the aisles of our storage facility. We are honored to have added her voice as well. We celebrate all of these voices in this issue.

Robert R. Archibald, Ph.D.
President, Missouri History Museum

 

 

We have multiple ways of conveying our memories and our accounts of ourselves, multiple means of communicating what we have learned from the past.