Tribute to the Doyenne of Black Modern Dance

The choreographer, Katherine Dunham, who died on May 21 in New York at the age of 96, lived a robust life, never losing the passion and dramatic flare that won her worldwide fame and adulation. Into her 90s, she welcomed visitors at her apartment on Manhattan’s West Side, still beautiful in her vivid, African head-wraps and dresses, bracelets of jade and cowry shells dangling on her arms and silver rings on her fingers. "We're all put on earth for a reason," she said. "The wise person discovers it early. I always knew there was something driving me."

A conversation with Dunham was a tour through some of the most significant cultural and social movements of our time. By introducing African, Caribbean and black American movement, dress and music to the American and European stage, she influenced almost every choreographer working today and brought the world’s attention to the richness of those cultures. By refusing to perform in segregated theaters or bend to Hollywood’s racism, she furthered civil rights for black Americans.

And by taking part in a hunger strike in 1992 to protest US policy that called for the deportation of Haitian boat refugees, she helped save thousands of lives. She affected both the famous like Marlon Brando, Eartha Kitt and James Dean, who studied her dance technique to improve their performing skills, and the not so famous, like the hundreds of children who discovered the redeeming power of the arts at the Performing Arts Training Center she established in impoverished East St. Louis, Ill. In fact, some did become famous, like Jackie Joyner-Kersee, the Olympic long jumper, and the filmmakers Reginald and Warrington Hudler among them.

The choreographer Alvin Ailey often remarked that it was a photograph of Katherine Dunham’s company outside a theater in Los Angeles that gave him his first realization of what black people could achieve in the performing arts. He honored her in 1987 by dedicating an entire season and tour to her works. "As long as there are young people on stage of color, her impact and name will not be forgotten," said Judith Jamison, artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

"Her passing is a monumental loss," said Garth Fagan, the artistic director of Garth Fagan Dance and choreographer of the Broadway hit 'The Lion King,' "but happily she leaves a legacy of true courage and invention. When she first saw my company perform, she told me to keep breaking rules … It's up to us to keep her legacy alive and to put quality dance on stage that truly speaks to the Diaspora and is at the same time cognizant of the entire world."

Dunham had to overcome great hardships, among them the early death of her mother, years with a physically abusive father and arthritic knees that pained her all her life. But once free of her unhappy household, she began studying at the University of Chicago, diving "voraciously," she said, "into anthropology." She fell in love with theater and music, too, soon creating her own student dance company, the Ballet Negre. When unable to maintain her troupe, she pursued a grant from the Julius Rosenwald Foundation for anthropological study in the Caribbean. "When I met the foundation board," Dunham said, "I didn't know whether to present myself as an anthrolopologist first or a dancer or visa versa." Hoping to have it both ways, she decided to wear a conservative tweed suit over a leotard and calf-length black skirt. “When they asked me what I would study if I had the funds,” she said, “I stepped out of my suit and performed a series of ballet steps followed by standard movements from modern dance, explaining that these were the techniques being taught in most American dancing schools.”

To illustrate the contrast between those styles and what she wanted to learn, she then performed a sizzling Afro-Caribbean dance, which left the entire board speechless. Shortly thereafter, she received a grant to study in Haiti, Jamaica, Martinique and Trinidad, places she chose because music and dance still played a part in almost every aspect of people's lives.

Dunham chose Haiti as her base, fascinated by its African traditions, especially voodoo, and she eventually became a voodoo priestess. A talented writer, she chronicled her Caribbean experience in three books, 'Journey to Accompong,' 'The Dances of Haiti,' and 'Island Possessed.' She purchased Habitation Leclerc, an estate in Haiti, as a refuge for her company, when they were not on tour.

"When we were really hard up," said Dale Wasserman, her stage manager and accountant from 1940 to 1956, "we’d go there and happily live on rum and coconut." In 1961, she opened a medical clinic on the estate to serve the community. By then, she had married the theater designer John Thomas Pratt, with whom she lived until his death in 1986. "He was so lovable," she said. "His sense of humor saved me from many unhappy times." In 1948, they adopted their daughter Marie Christine, a dance teacher now living in Rome.

When Dunham returned to Chicago from the Caribbean in 1937, she established the Negro Dance Group, later renamed the Katherine Dunham Dance Company and America's first professional black concert dance company. Using everything she had learned on the islands, she choreographed an exciting repertory based on Caribbean movement. In 1940, she made a splash on Broadway with the musical 'Cabin in the Sky,' and then starred in the films 'Carnival of Rhythm' and 'Stormy Weather.' Later the impresario Sol Hurok began managing her company, which toured as “Tropical Review.”

During her heyday as a performer, from the 1930s through the 1950s, Dunham beguiled audiences in fifty countries on six continents, with her fluid movements, extravagant African-inspired costumes, and keen sense of theatricality. Reviewers lost their objectivity. "There is an indescribable something about her, a bewitching subtlety in her every movement," wrote a critic in the Providence Journal in 1944.

In 1945, she started the Dunham School of Dance and Theater in New York, offering a wide range of classes in anthropology, art appreciation, philosophy and psychology. By then she has devised her unique technique founded on a series of exercises derived from primitive rhythms that emphasized isolation of various parts of the body. Today its influence pervades modern dance and even ballet borrows many of its movements.

By the early 1960s, her company and school became too much of a financial drain and she had to close them. During these difficult years, she became the first black choreographer for the Metropolitan Opera, overseeing a new production of 'Aida' and she also spent a year as cultural advisor to the president of Senegal. But a new mission soon captured her when she visited the neglected community of East St.Louis while teaching at Southern Illinois University. "I had to do something about it," she said. Within a year she had opened the Performing Arts Training Center, and could brag, "I got the warlords to come to classes by offering them martial arts and conga drumming."

Dunham received numerous awards acknowledging her contributions, including the Albert Schweitzer Music Award for a life devoted to the performing arts and service to humanity (1979), a Kennedy Center Honor’s Award (1983), and Induction into the Hall of Fame of the National Museum of Dance in Saratoga Springs (1987). Oprah Winfrey named her a legend, and one of her personal heroes.

To the end, Dunham remained playful, steely, and incandescent. "It takes nerve to stick around so long," she said. "You need durability."

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