KATHERINE DUNHAM

“I used to want the words ‘She tried’ on my tombstone. Now I want ‘She did it.’ ”

– Katherine Dunham

Katherine Mary Dunham (22 June 1909 – 21 May 2006) was an American dancer, choreographer, songwriter, author, educator and activist who was trained as an anthropologist. Dunham had one of the most successful dance careers in American and European theater of the 20th century and has been called the Matriarch and Queen Mother of Black Dance. During her heyday in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, she was renowned throughout Europe and Latin America as La Grande Katherine, and the Washington Post called her “Dance’s Katherine the Great.”

For more than 30 years she maintained the Katherine Dunham Dance Company, the only permanent, self-subsidized American black dance troupe at that time, and over her long career she choreographed more than 90 individual dances. Dunham was an innovator in African-American modern dance as well as a leader in the field of Dance Anthropology or Ethno choreology.

Katherine Dunham was born in Toilet, Illinois. Her father was an African-American business man who owned a dry-cleaning business. Dunham’s mother, a schoolteacher, was of mixed race. Dunham became fascinated with dance from a young age, and even before finishing high school she started a private dance school for young black children. At the age of 15, she organized the Blue Moon Cafe, a fund-raising cabaret for Brown’s Methodist Church in Joliet, where she gave her first public performance.

Upon completing Joliet Junior College, she moved to Chicago to join her brother Albert who was attending the University of Chicago. Later she studied both dance and anthropology while an undergraduate and graduate student at the University of Chicago during the 1930s. During this period she became interested in researching the origins of such popular dances as the cake-walk, the Lindy hop,and the black bottom. She showed great promise in her ethnographic studies of dance and studied under some of the great anthropologists of the day, Robert Redfield, (who introduced her to African dance traditions), A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, Edward Sapir, and Bronislaw Malinowski.

While doing graduate work in 1935-1936, she was awarded Travel Fellowships from the Julius Rosenwald and Guggenheim Foundations to conduct ethnographic study of the dance forms of the Caribbean, especially as manifested in the Vodun of Haiti, a path also followed by fellow anthropology student, Zora Neale Hurston; Professor Melville Herskovits of Northwestern University helped to provide the tutelage and preparation for her voyage. Dunham’s ground-breaking “field work helped to develop a now recognized sub-discipline of anthropology and also led to Ms. Dunham’s own understanding – both intellectual and kinesthetic – of the African roots of black dance in the Caribbean” and the USA. In 1939 she submitted her thesis, entitled “Dances of Haiti, Their Social Organization, Classification, Form and Function”.

Her stay in the Caribbean began in Jamaica, where she went to live several months in the remote isolated Maroon village of Accompong, deep in the Cockpit Country, and she later wrote a book, “Journey to Accompong” describing those experiences. Then she traveled on to Martinique and Trinidad and Tobago for short stays (primarily to do an investigation of Shango, the African God who remained an important presence in West Indian heritage) before arriving in Haiti, where she remained for several months, the first of her many extended stays in that country throughout the rest of her life.

While in Haiti, she investigated Voodoo rituals and years later, after extensive studies and initiations, she became a mambo (priestess) in the Vaudon religion. She also became friends with, among others, Dumarsais Estimé, then a high level politician, who later became President of Haiti in 1949. Somewhat later, she assisted him, at considerable risk to her life, when he was persecuted for his progressive policies and sent in exile to Jamaica after a coup-d’état.

When she returned to Chicago in 1936 she was awarded her Bachelor’s degree in Social Anthropology. As a result of her academic research “she acquired the title of ‘dancing anthropologist’ and actually founded the field of dance anthropology because of her intense study of African-influenced dance in the western hemisphere. This academic undertaking would also lead to the emergence and codification of the Dunham Technique, a dance technique utilizing African drums and rhythms as well as ballet and modern dance.”

While working on her masters degree, she was told by her advisers that she had to choose between anthropology and dance. Much to their regret, although she was offered another grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, she decided to choose dance, left her graduate studies before finishing her doctorate, and departed for the bright lights of Broadway and Hollywood.

On July 10, 1939, she married one of America’s most renowned costume and theatrical set designers, John Thomas Pratt, who managed her career and for the next 47 years until his death, was her artistic collaborator. Pratt, who was white (inter-racial marriages were controversial at the time), was the son of John M. Pratt. They have one adopted daughter, Marie-Christine Dunham Pratt. The senior Pratt had led the Association of Real Estate Taxpayers, which organized a tax strike in Chicago during the early 1930s. Dunham also began the Katherine Dunham Company, a troupe of dancers, singers, actors and musicians, which was the first African American modern dance company.

In 1949 she returned briefly to the USA where she temporarily suffered a nervous breakdown after the premature death of her brother Albert, who had been a promising philosophy professor at Howard University and a protegé of Alfred North Whitehead. During this time, she developed a warm friendship with famous psychologist and humanistic philosopher Erich Fromm, whom she had known in Europe.

Julie Belafonte, formerly a performer with the Katherine Dunham Company, met her husband, singer and later political activist Harry Belafonte, while working with the Company, and they both remained very close friends of Dunham.

While still in undergraduate studies, Dunham studied ballet under Mark Turbyfill of the Chicago Opera, and Russian dancer Ludmilla Speranza, formerly of the Moscow Theater, and worked with Ruth Page, who became prima ballerina of the Chicago Opera. When she was only 21, she formed a group called Ballet Nègres, the first black ballet company in the USA.

“First Negro Dance Recital” was presented by Hemsley Winfield and Edna Guy in New York, a dance composition “Negro Rhapsody” was presented at Beaux Arts Ball in Chicago by a group called Ballets Nègres. The group’s teacher, choreographer and chief dancer was the young Katherine Dunham. From 1933-36 she performed as a guest star for the Chicago Opera Company. Page wrote a scenario and choreographed La Guiablesse, based on a folk d the Negro Dance Group in Chicago in 1937. In March of that year she journeyed with her group to New York to take part in the Negro Dance Evening at the YMCA organized by Edna Guy.

At this time she first became associated with designer John Pratt, who she later married, and produced the first version of her dance composition L’Ag Ya, based on her research in Martinique. “With startingly exotic sets and costumes created by her late husband, John Pratt, the company instantly made their mark on America.”

In 1939 they went to New York where she was dance director of the Labor Stage of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union for the production of Pins and Needles. That same year she and her troupe performed at the Windsor Theatre in Tropics and Le Hot Jazz, including her principal Haitian drummer, Papa Augustin. Initially scheduled for one show, it was so popular among audiences that they stayed on for 13 weeks. This success led to the entire company being engaged in the Broadway production, Cabin in the Sky, staged by George Balanchine and starring Ethel Waters, a run that went on for 20 weeks in New York, with Dunham in the stunning role of Georgia Brown, before moving to the West Coast for extended performances there and then she performed in theaters and nightclubs in major cities throughout the USA between 1939-41.

Her performance in Cabin in the Sky soon “created a controversy that raged in the newspapers over whether the torrid, bare-midruffed and bare-torsoed dancers represented “art” or “sex”.  From there Hollywood opened up.

Another famous role as a seductress during this period was the ‘Woman with a Cigar’ from her solo role in the revue Shore Excursion. A New York Times critic wrote in 1940: “Her sense of rhythm, theater and costuming and her wonderful performers – as well as her choreography and dancing – put serious Negro music on the map once and for all. Another forties critic felt the show was so hot “There were times when I heard the scenery sizzle.”

In 1941, the company stayed in Los Angeles where Dunham made her first performance in movies, starring in a short film named Carnival of Rhythm, the first Hollywood dance film in color. Other movies she appeared in during this period included Star Spangled Rhythm (1942), the Abbott and Costello comedy Pardon My Sarong (1942), and the famous break-through Black musical, Stormy Weather (1943). Later that year, they returned to New York and in September 1943, under the management of the renowned impresario Sol Hurok, her troupe opened for Tropical Review, which was an immediate and enormous success at the Martin Beck Theatre. At the time, it was rumored that Hurok had insured Katherine Dunham’s legs for 1 million dollars (she later said it was a mere quarter million).

Commenting about it in the New York Times, renowned critic John Martin wrote that “throughout the evening Miss Dunham’s chief business is to sizzle, she is one hundred percent seductress.”

After their success of 156 performances in New York, they went on tour throughout the USA and Canada, but in Boston, the bastion of conservatism, her Revue was banned in 1944 after only one performance, although it was well received by the audience. A reviewer for the Boston Herald Tribune regarded Dunham as an ‘unconventional star’ because she did not usurp the limelight. Dunham produced other works during this period, including Rara-Tonga, her famous Rites de Passage, and Plantation Dances. Other big Broadway hits in 1945 were Carib Song and Windy City, and she later won acclaim for her balletic Choros.

In 1945, she opened and directed the Katherine Dunham School of Dance and Theatre near Times Square in New York City after her Dance Company was provided with rent-free studio space for 3 years by an admirer, Lee Shubert; it had an initial enrollment of 350 students.

The program included courses in dance, drama, performing arts, applied skills, humanities, cultural studies and Caribbean research, and in 1947 it was expanded and granted a charter as the Katherine Dunham School of Cultural Arts. The School was managed in Dunham’s absence by one of her dancers, Syllivia Fort, thrived for about 10 years and was considered one of the best learning centers of its type at the time. Schools inspired by it later opened in Stockholm, Paris and Rome by dancers trained by Dunham.

Her alumni included many future celebrities, such as Eartha Kitt, who, as a teenager, won a scholarship to her school and later became one of her dancers before moving on to a successful singing career. Others who attended her school included James Dean, Gregory Peck, Jose Ferrer, Jennifer Jones, Shelley Winters, Sidney Poitier, Shirley MacLaine, Doris Duke and Warren Beatty. Marlon Brando frequently dropped in to play the bongo drums, and jazz musician Charles Mingus held regular jam sessions with the drummers. Known for her many innovations, she developed a dance pedagogy named the Dunham Technique which won international acclaim and is now taught as a modern dance style in dance schools, including at the Harkness Dance Center of the 92nd Street Y.

In Hollywood, she refused to sign a lucrative studio contract when the producer said she would have to replace some of her darker-skinned company members. She and her company frequently had difficulties finding adequate accommodations while on tour because in many regions of the USA blacks were not allowed to stay at hotels.The Katherine Dunham Company toured throughout North America in the mid-1940s, even performing in the then segregated South, where Ms. Dunham once refused to hold a show after finding out that the city’s black residents had not been allowed to buy tickets for the performance. On another occasion, after getting a rousing standing ovation in Tennessee, she told the audience she would not return until they were completely desegregated and blacks were not obliged to only stand in the rear sections.

In 1946 Dunham returned to Broadway for a revue named Bal Nègre, then in late 1947 she opened in Las Vegas, the first year that the city became a popular entertainment destination. The next year, in 1947 she went to Mexico and her dance troupe’s performance was so popular that they remained there for more than 2 months. This was the beginning of more than 20 years performing almost exclusively internationally throughout Europe, North Africa, South America, Australia and the Far East, during which she performed in 57 countries, and throughout this period she continued to develop dozens of new productions.

After Mexico, Dunham began touring in Europe, where she was an immediate sensation. She opened Caribbean Rhapsody first at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London, then swept on to Theatre des Champs Elysées in Paris and took the city by storm and was treated as a member of the jet set and mixed with nobility and celebrities such as famous French actor Maurice Chevalier. It was the first time that Europe had seen black dance as an art form and also the first time that the special elements of American modern dance appeared outside America. The tour was a grand success, and newspapers proclaimed that Katherine Dunham was sweeping Europe in a wave of popularity greater than that of Isadora Duncan thirty years earlier. The Dunham troupe, in the course of worldwide travels in the following decade, was to become the best-known American dance troupe in the world. Despite these successes, the company frequently ran into periods of financial difficulties, as Dunham was required to support all of the 30-40 dancers and musicians.

While Dunham was recognized as ‘unofficially’ representing American cultural life in her foreign tours, she was given very little assistance of any kind by the US State Department.

Despite strong opposition from the State Dept., the Katherine Dunham Company performed Southland, a ballet whose theme dramatizing lynching of blacks in the racist American South, in Santiago, Chile. As a result, she later experienced some diplomatic ‘difficulties’ on her tours.

Consequently, while the State Dept. regularly subsidized other less well known groups, it consistently refused to support her company (even when it was entertaining US Army troops), although at the same time it did not hesitate to take credit for them as ‘unofficial artistic and cultural representatives.’ In attempts to downplay their popularity, the State Dept. repeatedly scheduled performances of their cultural representatives in conflict with those of the Dunham Company, invited ambassadors and other foreign officials to these performances, despite the frequent protests of officials and recommendations that Dunham’s Company be supported.

In 1948, she made an appearance in the movie Casbah, and also that year appeared in the first ever hour-long American spectacular televised by NBC when television was first beginning to spread across the USA. This was followed by television spectaculars on BBC in London, Buenos Aires (where she was a house guest of Evita Peron), Toronto, Sydney, Mexico, and Germany.

While in Brazil Dunham was refused a room at the finest hotel in São Paulo, the Hotel Esplanada, due to her race. She made sure the incident was publicized and in response the Afonso Arinos law was passed in 1951 forbidding racial discrimination in public places.

Dunham and her dance troupe remained outside of the USA for most of the next 20 years with the exception of several short stays for some choreography work in several Hollywood movies, including Green Mansions and The Bible, and others in Europe and elsewhere, such as Botta e Riposta, but made no further TV appearances until long after she retired. The last appearance of the Dunham Company (on Broadway) in New York was in 1962, in the production Bamboche!, which included a contingent from the Royal Troupe of Morocco.

After collaborating with symphony orchestras in San Francisco and Los Angeles, Dunham, with Aida in 1963, Katherine Dunham became the first African-American to choreograph for the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.

In 1965 Dunham dissolved her company when President Johnson nominated her to be technical cultural adviser, i.e. a sort of cultural ambassador, to the government of Senegal in West Africa, to help train the Senegalese National Ballet, and assist President Leopold Senghor in sponsoring the First Pan-African World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar from 1965-6. Afterwards she established a second home there and occasionally returned to Senegal to scout for talented African musicians and dancers.

Throughout the time of her dance career, Dunham continued publishing articles in anthropology under the name of Kaye Dunn, and to give occasional lectures in anthropology, including at Yale University, and the Royal Anthropological Societies in London and Paris.

In 1978 Dunham was featured in the PBS special, Divine Drumbeats: Katherine Dunham and Her People narrated by James Earl Jones, as part of the Dance in America series. Famous choreographer Alvin Ailey later produced a tribute for her in 1987-8 with his American Dance Theatre at Carnegie Hall entitled The Magic of Katherine Dunham.

The first work, entitled A Touch of Innocence, was published in 1958. A continuation based on her experiences in Haiti, Island Possessed, was published in 1969, and another written work, Kasamance, based on her African experiences, was published in 1974.

In 1964, she moved to settle in East St. Louis, where she was an artist-in-residence at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. One of her fellow professors with whom she collaborated was renowned architect Buckminister Fuller, who has been called the “planet’s friendly genius”. In 1967 she retired after presenting a final show at the famous Apollo Theatre in Harlem, New York. Even in retirement Dunham continued her choreography, and one of her major works was directing Scott Joplin’s opera Treemonisha (in 1972).

In 1967, Dunham opened the Performing Arts Training Center (PATC) in East St. Louis, Illinois as an attempt to use the arts to combat poverty and urban unrest. It served as a catharsis after the 1968 riots, during which she encouraged gang members in the ghetto to vent their frustrations with drumming and dance. The PATC drew on former members of Dunham’s touring company as well as local residents for its teaching staff. While trying to help the young people in the community she was even jailed herself, making international headlines which quickly embarrassed local police officials to release her.

She also continued refining and teaching the Dunham Technique to transmit that knowledge to succeeding generations of dance students, and lecturing at annual Masters Seminars in St. Louis which attracted dance students from around the world every summer until her death. She also established the Katherine Dunham Centers for Arts and Humanities and Children’s Workshop in East St. Louis to preserve Haitian and African instruments and artifacts from her own personal collection.

In 1992, at the age of 82, Katherine Dunham went on a highly publicized hunger strike to protest the discriminatory US foreign policy against Haitian boat-people. Time Magazine reported that, “she went on a 47-day hunger strike to protest the U.S.’s forced repatriation of Haitian refugees. “My job”, she said, “is to create a useful legacy”. [3]

Dick Gregory led a non-stop vigil at her home, where many famous personalities came to show their respect, such Debbie Allen, Jonathan Demme, the leader of the Nation of Islam Louis Farrakhan.

This initiative drew international publicity to the plight and US discrimination against Haitian boat-people, and she only ended her fast after exiled Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and Jesse Jackson came to personally request that she stop risking her life for this cause. After it ended, ABC News nominated her as Person of the Week.

In recognition of her stance, President Aristide later awarded her a medal of Haiti’s highest honor, and called her the “Spiritual Mother of Haiti.”

Katherine Dunham, died on May 21, 2006. Cause of death was not released. She was 96.

SOURCE: Wikipedia, The Blog of Death

KATHERINE DUNHAM IN MOTION