Katherine Dunham, the choreographer, social activist and world-renowned dancer, died Sunday in her New York apartment. She was 96.

The cause of her death was unknown Sunday evening, said Charlotte Ottley, Miss Dunham's executive liaison in the St. Louis area.

Miss Dunham had hoped to return for good to her house on North 10th Street in East St. Louis. Friends said she was expected back by the end of the month.

"Life goes on, and I'm just sad we have to go on without her," said Donna Pollion, the interim executive administrator for the Katherine Dunham Centers for Arts and Humanities. "That will be a big void in my life."

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Miss Dunham, for a quarter-century a part-time but socially and politically active resident of East St. Louis, long had been recognized as a leader in the field of black dance.

In 1969 she was cited by Dance Magazine as the "forerunner of the numerous fine contemporary Negro groups now emerging and developing, the first of the fighters for the Negro dance company."

Choreographer Agnes de Mille once observed that Miss Dunham "pioneered in a difficult field, cutting away from all traditional cliches and presenting the Negro in fresh, astute and delicately observed moods."

Dance critic Walter Terry wrote in Saturday Review that Miss Dunham, more than any other black choreographer, "celebrated the strength, the fortitude, the faith, the prowess and the majesty" of her race.

Research as a student

Miss Dunham was born in 1909 in the Chicago suburb of Glen Ellyn. When she was 5, she moved with her family to Joliet, Ill., and her involvement with dance began while she was in high school there.

She attended junior college in Joliet and later the University of Chicago, where she majored in social anthropology. In 1935, Miss Dunham was awarded the University of Chicago's Julius Rosenwald Foundation travel fellowship.

After finishing her degree at the University of Chicago, she was hired as dance director for Chicago's Federal Theatre Project. A fiery style - often as much erotic as exotic, yet always tasteful and impeccably researched - would characterize Miss Dunham's work for the next several decades.

In the spring of 1938, she formed her own company with members of the Federal Theatre Project troupe and began to explore the connection of Caribbean dance to its African roots. After the Dunham Dance Company traveled to New York in 1940 and presented a program titled "Tropics and Le Jazz Hot," New York Times critic John Martin wrote: "Her performance ... may very well become a historic occasion."

In the World War II years, the Dunham Dance Company worked on Broadway and in Hollywood. The company also undertook a nationwide tour, in the course of which Miss Dunham successfully filed suits against hotels in Cincinnati and Chicago for racial discrimination.

In 1945, in New York, she opened the Katherine Dunham School of Arts and Research. That same year her company performed in the Broadway shows "Carib Song" and "Windy City," and in 1946 it presented an evening-length dance event titled "Bal Negre."

"Bal Negre," with sets and costumes by her husband John Pratt, was an enormous success, and in the next several seasons it traveled to Mexico, South America and Europe. The Dunham company toured Europe and South America in 1948 with a program called "Caribbean Rhapsody," and it continued to perform worldwide until 1957.

Based in Haiti, where she owned property she hoped to turn into a tourist hotel, Miss Dunham spent most of 1958 writing her autobiography, "A Touch of Innocence," and setting up a medical clinic. A Chevalier in the Haitian Legion of Honor since 1949, in 1959 she was granted the title Commander and Grand Officer.

In the same year, she re-established her dance company and embarked on another European tour. In 1963, Miss Dunham provided choreography for a Metropolitan Opera staging of "Aida." That's where she met Sally Bliss, who was dancing with the ballet company.

Bliss, who is now the executive director of Dance St. Louis, danced professionally in New York for 40 years. Bliss studied under Dunham for two months in preparation for "Aida."

"She was scary," Bliss said. "When she walked into the room, she scared you because she was so great a woman. You knew you were in the presence of a great artist."

In 1964, Miss Dunham was invited to take part in another opera, a student production of "Faust," at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

It was in conjunction with the "Faust" production that she first visited East St. Louis. She was deeply moved by the poverty she saw there, and she proposed an educational project that would reach "far beyond dance in the popular definition" and be concerned "with the fundamentals of human society."

In explaining her goals to a student reporter from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, Miss Dunham said: "What we are trying to do is break through apathy. It's not so much teaching people to perform as it is teaching them, through performing, that they have individual worth and can relate to other people."

Early in 1967, Miss Dunham was appointed visiting artist in the Fine Arts Division of SIU Edwardsville. She later became the university's cult