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Katherine Dunham

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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. She has been called the Matriarch and Queen Mother of Black Dance,[citation needed] and had one of the most successful dance careers in American and European theatre of the 20th century. 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 Dance Company, the only permanent, self-subsidized dance troupe in America. Dunham was an innovator in African-American modern dance as well as a leader in the field of Dance Anthropology, or Ethnochoreology (see also Dance Studies). She was a trail-blazer who led the way in opening the stage doors and overcoming racial prejudice for entertainers of color in Broadway, Hollywood, Las Vegas and the international concert circuit. Anna Kisselgoff, a scholar of dance, called her "a major pioneer in Black theatrical dance ... ahead of her time." "In introducing authentic African dance-movements to her company and audiences, Dunham - perhaps more than any other choreographer of the time - exploded the possibilities of modern dance expression." The highly respected DANCE magazine did a feature cover story on her entitled "One-Woman Revolution." As Wendy Perron wrote in DANCE, "Jazz dance, 'fusion' and the search for our cultural identity all have their antecedents in Dunham's work as a dancer, choreographer and anthropologist. She was the first American dancer to present indigenous forms on a concert stage, the first to sustain a black dance company, the first black person to choreograph for the Metropolitan Opera. She created and performed in works for stage, clubs and Hollywood films; she started a school and a technique that continue to flourish; she fought unstintingly for racial justice." Scholar of the arts, Harold Cruse wrote in 1964: "Her early and life-long search for meaning and artistic values for black people, as well as for all peoples, has motivated, created opportunities for, and launched careers for generations of young black artists ... Afro-American dance was usually in the avant-garde of modern dance ... Dunham's entire career spans the period of the emergence of Afro-American dance as a serious art." Black writer Arthur Todd described her as "one of our national treasures." Regarding her impact and effect he wrote: "The rise of American Negro dance commenced ... when Katherine Dunham and her company skyrocketed into the Windsor Theatre in New York, from Chicago in 1940, and made an indelible stamp on the dance world... Miss Dunham opened the doors that made possible the rapid upswing of this dance for the present generation." At the age of 83, in 1992, she went on a highly publicized 47-day hunger strike to protest the discriminatory US foreign policy against Haitian boat-people. Later President Aristide awarded her a medal of Haiti's highest honor, and called her the "Spiritual Mother of Haiti." 

--Raycadien 20:40, 4 August 2006 (UTC)--Raycadien 20:40, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Background and anthropology

Dunham was born in Joliet, Illinois of mixed racial heritage. Her father, who owned a dry-cleaning business, was African-American, and her mother, a schoolteacher, was from Canada, whose parents were white and Native American. She 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 performances. 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 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 1935-6, 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 [1]; Professor Melville Herskovitts 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 subdiscipline 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 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, Dumersais Estimé, then a high level politician, who later became President of Haiti, and somewhat later assisted him, at considerable risk to her life, when he was persecuted 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 advisors 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 brigtht lights of Broadway and Hollywood.


Career, family, and politics

While still in undergraduate studies, Dunham studied ballet under Mark Turbyfield of the Chicago Opera, and Russian dancer Ludmilla Speranza, formerly of the Moscow Theatre, 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. "In 1931, the same year that the "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 tale in Lafcadio Hearne's "Two Years in the West Indies." "It was presented in Chicago in 1933, with a Black cast and Page dancing the lead. The following year it was repeated with Katherine Dunham in the role Page had created." In 1934, Dunham was a choreographer/performer for the Chicago World's Fair.

After her return from her graduate work in the Caribbean, she founded 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. The following year she was the director for the Works Project Administration's (WPA) Writers Project and was dance director for the Chicago unit. She was the choreographer for the Chicago production of Run Lil Chillun, performed at the Goodman Theatre. 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 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 theatres and nightclubs in major cities throughout the USA between 1939-41. Her performance in Cabin in the Sky "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.

On July 10, 1939, she married producer and one of America's most renowned costume and theatrical set designers, John Thomas Pratt [2], who managed her career. Pratt, who was white (inter-racial marriages were controversial at the time), was the son of John M. 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 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, the Abbott and Costello comedy Pardon My Sarong in 1942, and the famous break-through Black musical, Stormy Weather, in 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. "During the course of the tour, Dunham and the troupe had recurrant problems with racial discrimination, leading her to a posture of militancy which was to characterize her subsequent career. 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. The Katherine Dunham Company became an incubator for many well known performers, including Archie Savage, Talley Beatty, Janet Collins, Lenwood Morris, Vanoye Aikens and Tommy Gomez , and Julie Belafonte met her husband, singer and later political activist Harry Belafonte, through her performances.

In 1945 she opened and directed the Katherine Dunham School of Dance and Theatre near Times Square in New York City when 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. It 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 Ms. 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), James Dean, Jose Ferrar, Jennifer Jones, Shelly Winters, Doris Duke and Warren Beatty, Marlin Brando frequently dropped in to play the bongo drums, and jazz musician Charlie 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. The late greeat Alvin Ailey, who stated that he first became interested in dance as a professional career after having seen a performance of the Katherine Dunham Company as a young teenager of 14 in Los Angeles, called the Dunham Technique "The closest thing to a unified Afro-American dance existing. As one of her biographers, Joyce Aschenbrenner, wrote: "Today, it is safe to say, there is no American black dancer who has not been influenced by the Dunham Technique, unless he or she works entirely within a classical genre" and the Dunham Technique is still taught to anyone who studies modern dance.

The company continued touring 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 segregated and blacks were not obliged to only stand in the rear sections. They frequently had difficulties finding adequate accommodations while on tour because in many regions of the USA blacks were not allowed to stay at hotels. In 1946 Dunham returned to Broadway for aq revue named Bal Nègre, then in late 1947 she opened in Las Vegas, the first year that the city became a popular entertainment destination.

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 jetset 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. She also influenced hat styles on the continent as well as spring fashion collections, featuring the Dunham line and Caribbean Rhapsody, and the Chiroteque Française made a bronze cast of her feet for a museum of important personalities." "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." Richard Buckle, ballet historian and critic, wrote: "her company of magnificent dancers and musicians ... met with the success it has and that herself as explorer, thinker, inventor, organizer, and dancer should have reached a place in the estimation of the world, has done more than a million pamphlets could for the service of her people." "Dunham's European success led to considerable imitation of her work in European revues ... it is safe to say that the perspectives of concert-theatrical dance in Europe were profoundly affected by the performances of the Dunham troupe." 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.

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 protegee of Alfred North Whitehead, and she developed a warm friendship with famous psychologist and humanistic philosopher Erich Fromm, whom she had known in Europe. After her recovery she made an appearance in the movie Casbah, and also appeared in the first ever hour-long American Spectacular televised by NBC (when television was first beginning to spread across the USA), followed by television spectaculars on BBC in London, Buenos Aires (where she was a house guest of Evita Peron), Toronto, Sydney, Mexico and Germany. But because 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 made no further TV appearances until long after she retired, Katherine Dunham is unfortunately less well known than she should be among the younger generation in her own country, especially among African-Americans.

By 1957 Dunham was under severe personal strain that was affecting her health, and she decided to live for a year in relative isolation in Kyoto, Japan, where she worked on writing an autobiography of her youth, entitled A Touch of Innocence, which was published in 1958.

"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." "With Aida in 1963, Dunham continued to secure her place in artistic history by becoming the first black to choreograph for the Metropolitan Opera" in New York.

While Dunham was recognized as 'unofficially' representing American cultural life in her foreign tours, she was given very little asssistance 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 1967 she retired after presenting a final show at the famous Apollo Theatre in Harlem, New York, then 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, the "planet's friendly genius"). Dunham was also known for her anthropological work in studies into Haitian and Caribbean culture.

In 1978 Dunham was featured in a PBS special entitled Divine Drumbeats: Katherine Dunham and Her People narrated by James Earl Jones, as part of the Dance in America series.

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. The PATC drew on former members of Dunham's touring company as well as local residents for its teaching staff.


Time Magazine reported that at age 82, "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]

Katherine Dunham died in her sleep in New York City on 21 May 2006.

Awards

Books

  • Island Possessed -1969
  • A Touch of Innocence -1959
  • Dances of Haiti -1947
  • Journey to Accompong -1946

Filmography

  • Música en la noche (1958)
  • Mambo (1954)
  • Casbah (1948)
  • Cuban Episode (1944)
  • Stormy Weather (1943)
  • Carnival of Rhythm (1941)

Obituaries

References

  • Aschenbrenner, Joyce, Katherine Dunham: Dancing a Life. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002.
  • Clark, VeVe, and Johnson, Sara E., Kaiso! Writings By and About Katherine Dunham. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006.
  • Haskins, James, Katherine Dunham. New York: Coward, McCann, & Geoghegan, 1982.
  • Hill, Constance, "Katherine Dunham's 'Southland': Protest in the Face of Repression," in Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance, ed. Thomas F. DeFrantz. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002.
  • Kraut, Anthea, "Between Primitivism and Diaspora: The Dance Performances of Josephine Baker, Zora Neale Hurston, and Katherine Dunham," Theatre Journal 55 (2003): 433–50.
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