Katherine Dunham, 96, Dancer of Afro-Caribbean Influences
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Katherine Dunham, who died Sunday at 96, was a dancer and choreographer who brought Afro-Caribbean and American black dance to audiences on stage, screen, and around the world.
Trained both in anthropology and classical ballet, she used classical and modern training, plus dances recorded during fieldwork in Jamaica and Haiti in the 1930s, as the basis of her “Dunham Technique,” which influenced generations of dancers and was later documented by the Library of Congress. She taught at a Manhattan studio initially located at the studio of a choreographer who was one of Dunham’s spiritual forebears, Isadora Duncan.
But her career was as much about show business as it was about ethnic preservation. Dunham was hyped as possessing legs insured for $100,000.
Dunham first played on Broadway, as Georgia Brown in the 1940 plantation fantasy “Cabin in the Sky.” George Balanchine was credited with the choreography, but many felt she should have been too. She choreographed for Hollywood movies, starting with the Abbott and Costello’s wartime diversion “Pardon My Sarong” (1942), and later, more impressively, for “The Bible” (1966).
But her most important performances were those given over two decades ago by her touring company, starting in 1941 with an American tour of “Cabin in the Sky.” The company featured a constantly shifting repertoire of dances with titles like “Rites de Passage,” “Flaming Youth 1927,” “Voodoo in Haiti,” and “Br’er Rabbit an’ de Tah Baby.” The company toured 57 countries and Dunham, like another forebear, Josephine Baker, became “the toast of Paris,” according to a 1949 gossip item linking her to the playboy Aly Khan.
In the 1970s, having retired from the stage, Dunham took her community-centered vision of dance a step further by establishing a youth training center in East St. Louis, one of the most afflicted ghettos in America. “I was trying to steer them into something more constructive than genocide,” Dunham told the author of the biography “Katherine Dunham” (1981), Jeannine Dominy. “Everyone needs, if not a culture hero, a culturally heroic society.”
Deprivation and loss had been part of her childhood, too. Dunham’s father was a black tailor and occasional guitarist. Her mother, of French Canadian and Indian stock, was two decades older than her father, and died when Dunham was just 4. She and a brother grew up with relatives, then moved back in with her newly remarried father, who was severe and unpredictable, and whose dry cleaning business was not doing well. They fell out. Writing in the third person of her own childhood in her memoir “A Touch of Innocence” (1959), Dunham wrote of his “touch and fondling that made everything about her life seem smudgy and unclean.”
In high school, Dunham studied modern dance, and classical ballet with a Russian, Ludmilla Speranzeva, who also introduced her to Spanish dance. After junior college in Joliet, Ill., Dunham received a scholarship to the University of Chicago, where she studied anthropology under a specialist in Latin American culture, Robert Redfield. Studying with Redfield, and later with Melville Herskovits at Northwestern, sparked Dunham’s interest in cultural continuities between Africa and the Caribbean and modern American blacks.
In 1931, while still in college, Dunham founded Ballet Negre, her first dance company. It soon failed, but in 1933 she opened her first dance school, the Negro Dance Group, and the following year danced the leading role in a Chicago Opera production of Ruth Page’s “La Guiblesse” (Devil Woman), based on Martinique folklore and featuring an all-black cast. Dunham stayed on at the Opera as Page’s assistant.
Beginning in 1935, Dunham traveled to Jamaica, Martinique, Trinidad, and Haiti, where she collected dances as part of anthropological fieldwork. Haitian Voodoo rituals, Martinique fighting dances, and even street life (“Girl With a Cigar”) became raw material for her choreography. Dunham added promiscuous delvings into the black experience: Uncle Remus tales, Americana (“Barrelhouse”), and lynchings were all part of the mix.
Having reestablished her company in Chicago, Dunham danced under contract for the WPA, and choreographed her first full-length ballet, “L’Ag’Ya,” a tale of jealous lovers, in 1938. In 1939, Dunham shared a stage in Chicago with Duke Ellington, and choreographed her first work for Broadway, which appeared in the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union Players revue “Pins and Needles.”
Dunham’s ascent was then rapid – “Cabin in the Sky” on Broadway and its national tour was followed by a call to Hollywood for “Pardon my Sarong” and an appearance in “Storm Weather” (1943), and a Broadway success,”Tropical Review,” followed by another national tour. In between, Dunham found time to premiere several new works and to marry for a second time, this time to a stage veteran who would be her main costume and set designer for the rest of her career, John Pratt. They adopted a daughter.
Life for the next two decades was a constant round of world touring and running her dance studio. She also wrote numerous popular articles about her fieldwork, and two books,”Journey to Accompong” (1946), about her experiences in Jamaica, and “The Dances of Haiti” (1947), the forward for the French edition was by leading anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss.
Dunham’s last Broadway show, “Bamboche!” staged with Moroccan dancers, closed in 1962 after just eight performances, and her crossover effort choreographing Aida at the Metropolitan Opera the following year was met with mixed reviews. Her productivity continued unabated. In addition to the first volume of her memoirs in 1959, her paintings were sold in galleries in Paris and London, and in 1964 she published a short story in Ellery Queen’s Magazine. She left the stage for the most part, except for special performances, by the mid-1960s.
In 1967, Dunham began her experiment in dance education and social work in East St. Louis. Her project got off with a splash when she made national news by being arrested while consorting with members of a gang called the Imperial Warlords. She also took up a series of visiting university appointments. In 1977, she opened a museum devoted to her career and a children’s workshop.
Beginning in the 1970s, Dunham’s life became nearly as dizzying a whirl of honorary degrees and awards as it had been earlier of new works and performances. She won the Albert Schweitzer Music Award in 1979, the Kennedy Center Honors in 1983, knighthoods from Haiti and France in 1987, the National Medal of the Arts in 1989, and a raft of others, including a score of honorary doctorates in dance, anthropology, social work, and law.
In 1992, age 82, Dunham staged a 47-day hunger strike to protest the plight of Haitian refugees being forcibly repatriated by America.
Dunham lived a long and active life, and by the end was able to witness with pleasure that the dances she choreographed were finding their way back to the ethnic communities that inspired them.
Katherine Dunham
Born June 22, 1909, in Chicago; died May 20 at a retirement home in Manhattan; survived by her adopted daughter, Marie-Christine Dunham-Pratt; divorced in 1931 from her first husband Jordis Mc-Coo, she was predeceased by her second husband, John Pratt, in 1986.