Download Katherine Dunham an essay by Joanna Dee Das

Katherine Dunham (1909-2006)
by Joanna Dee Das
As an artist, educator, anthropologist, and
activist, Katherine Dunham transformed the
field of twentieth-century dance. Though other
African American choreographers had come
before her, Dunham was the most successful in
bringing African diasporic aesthetics to the
concert dance stage and developing her own
technique. Thus she is widely considered the
founder of black concert dance in the United
States and also a major influence on the idioms
of both modern and jazz dance. From the 1930s
through the 1960s, her company toured the
United States, Europe, Latin America, and Asia.
She established several schools, including the
Katherine Dunham School of Dance in New York
in 1945 and the Performing Arts Training Center
in East St. Louis in 1967, and published
numerous books and articles. As an activist, she
publicly challenged segregation and
discrimination throughout her life. In
recognition of her important legacy, she
received numerous honorary awards and
degrees, including the Kennedy Center Honors
in 1983 and the National Medal of the Arts in
1989.
***
Katherine Dunham was born on June 22, 1909
in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. She fell in love with dance
and theater as a child, but did not have much
opportunity to explore her interest until moving
to Chicago in 1928. Her older brother, Albert
Dunham Jr., invited her to join the Cube
Theatre, which he had co-founded to produce
serious plays about African American life. There
she met members of the New Negro Movement
such as Langston Hughes and Alain Locke who
believed in the power of the arts to create
social change. Dunham’s time at the Cube
revived her love of performance and gave her a
purpose. In January, 1930, she voiced a desire
to start a ballet company that would challenge
the minstrelsy stereotypes that still dominated
black performance. New York dancers such as
Edna Guy and Hemsley Winfield had begun to
choreograph modern dance works that similarly
refuted existing stereotypes, but for the most
part the concept of a black dance company was
Copyright © 2012 Dance Heritage Coalition
unheard of at the time. Mary Hunter, a director
at the Cube, introduced Dunham to ballet
dancer and poet Mark Turbyfill, who agreed to
give her ballet classes and co-found a company,
Ballet Nègre.
The Ballet Nègre soon folded, but in 1932
Dunham started the Negro Dance Group with
Ludmila Speranzeva, a former dancer with the
Chauve-Souris, an émigré cabaret company
from Moscow. Speranzeva had also trained
briefly with modern dance pioneer Mary
Wigman, and drawing on this experience she
encouraged Dunham to become more
expressive of her inner emotions in her
performances. Dunham later remarked, “I think
I must have gotten a lot of that explosive
feeling, and also a freedom of sexual
presentation” from Speranzeva (Dunham 1999,
5). The Chicago Defender wrote of the Negro
Dance Group’s December, 1932 performance at
the Beaux Arts Ball, “The[se] modern dancers
are beginning a new era in the history of the
Race dancer” (12). Dunham also began to dance
with the choreographer Ruth Page, who gave
her the lead role in a ballet inspired by a
Martinican folk tale: La Guiablesse (1933). She
performed the role to great critical acclaim at
the Chicago Opera House in 1934.
Meanwhile, Dunham had also been a student of
anthropology at the University of Chicago since
1928 and had begun developing the idea of
using ethnographic research to enrich her
performances onstage. In 1934, she applied to
the Rosenwald Foundation for a grant to study
modern dance at the Wigman School in New
York, ballet at the School of American Ballet in
New York, and what she called “primitive
dance” in the field. The Rosenwald Foundation
denied her request for further study of modern
dance and ballet, but gave her funding to
conduct ethnographic fieldwork in the
Caribbean under the auspices of Melville
Herskovits. Leaving her first husband Jordis
McCoo in Chicago, Dunham sailed for the
Caribbean in June 1935.
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Dunham’s ten months in Jamaica, Martinique,
Trinidad, and Haiti changed her life. She not
only found the dance materials she sought, but
also developed a novel method of ethnographic
fieldwork, a sense of connection with the
African diaspora, and a new approach to
choreography. Rather than merely observing, as
her mentors implored her to do, Dunham
participated, even undergoing initiation into the
Haitian religion of Vodun. Her dancing won her
the acceptance and admiration of the people
she met, and she felt a new sense of kinship
through shared experience (Dunham 1969, 79).
In her letters to Herskovits, she reflected on her
own role in the community, something that
purportedly objective anthropologists of her era
did not do. Her self-reflexive, participatory
approach anticipated changes in anthropology
that would occur decades later (Ramsey, 211).
While in the Caribbean, Dunham also
formulated a theory of the relationship
between form and function in dance: dance was
not an abstract aesthetic expression, but rather
served specific functions. For example, social
dances that emphasized the pelvic region
released sexual tension, whereas ritual funeral
dances served as catharsis for grief (Dunham
1941, 2-4). She published her ethnographic
observations in magazines such as Esquire and
Educational Dance, as well as in several books,
including Journey to Accompong (1946) and
Island Possessed (1969).
After returning to Chicago in 1936, Dunham
revived her company and began to develop a
new technique that she could use to teach her
dancers the complex, polyrhythmic movements
of the Caribbean. She performed in the Negro
Dance Evening at the 92nd Street Y in New York
City on March 7, 1937, but her first major
breakthrough was L’Ag’Ya, which premiered in
January 1938 as part of Chicago’s Federal
Theatre Project. In Dunham’s theatrical
interpretation of the ag’ya, a fighting dance
from Martinique, she combined Afro-Caribbean,
ballet, and modern dance and fit the movement
into a narrative that Chicago audiences would
understand: a love triangle. While working on
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this ballet, Dunham met the designer John
Pratt, who would become her lifelong artistic
collaborator and second husband.
As a result of L’Ag’Ya’s positive reception, Louis
Schaeffer of the Labor Stage invited Dunham to
New York to create new numbers for the
Broadway revue Pins and Needles. Dunham
used the theater during off hours to rehearse
material for her own company. On February 18,
1940, “Katherine Dunham and Dance Group”
gave a Sunday afternoon recital entitled Tropics
and Le Jazz “Hot” at the Windsor Theatre. In his
February 19, 1940 review of the concert, New
York Times dance critic John Martin called
Dunham a “revelation” and her choreography
“the nearest thing that has yet been shown
hereabouts to the basis of a true Negro dance
art” in his (23). Other reviewers, including Dan
Burley of the African American newspaper New
York Amsterdam News agreed unequivocally
that Dunham had founded a new genre: Negro
dance (21).
The success of Tropics and Le Jazz “Hot”
catapulted Dunham into the limelight. George
Balanchine asked her to play the seductress
Georgia Brown in the Broadway musical Cabin
in the Sky (1940), for which Dunham also
contributed choreography. From Broadway,
Dunham went to the West Coast for two years,
where Alvin Ailey became inspired to dance
after seeing one of Dunham’s shows. In addition
to stage performances, Dunham made movies
such as Carnival of Rhythm (1941), StarSpangled Rhythm (1942), and Stormy Weather
(1943) while in California. Dunham’s “Stormy
Weather” ballet opened a new space of
imaginative possibility outside of the prescribed
arenas of black dance on film, namely
minstrelsy and tap. Her choreography combined
balletic jumps, leg extensions, and lifts with
pulsating torsos and undulating spines
borrowed from her Caribbean material.
After the West Coast, Dunham and her
company toured the United States under the
impresario Sol Hurok in Tropical Revue
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(1943-1945), then performed in Carib Song
(1945) and Bal Negre (1946) on Broadway.
These shows included several notable works,
such as Rites de Passage (1941), which explored
group rituals surrounding puberty, marriage,
and death. The Boston city censor banned the
number, considering it too sexually explicit,
which then galvanized several members of
Boston’s cultural elite to write editorials in
support of the ballet’s artistic merits.
Controversy about the sexual nature of
Dunham’s choreography would continue to
surface throughout her career. Another
important ballet, Shango (1945), blended
aspects of Trinidadian Santería and Haitian
Vodun to examine the nature of divine
possession. One of Dunham’s most beloved
numbers, Rara Tonga (1939), was set in
Melanesia, demonstrating that she never
considered her creative abilities to be limited to
the areas of her ethnographic research.
During this period of national touring, Dunham
became active in civil rights causes. She
constantly battled housing segregation on tour
and at one point threatened to sue the
Blackstone Hotel in Chicago for racial
discrimination. In 1944 she gave a speech to the
audience in Louisville, Kentucky in which she
stated that she would not return to the city
until the theater was integrated. Dunham also
channeled her activism into the Katherine
Dunham School of Dance (later the Dunham
School of Dance and Theatre, and then the
Dunham School of Cultural Arts), which
operated from September 1945 to February
1954 in New York City. The School had an
interracial, international faculty and student
body, which Dunham touted as a model for
racial egalitarianism. Just as importantly, the
School served to disseminate the Dunham
Technique and give black dance a status in the
performing arts world. Several aspects of the
Dunham Technique would become integral to
both modern and jazz dance in America:
isolations of the head, shoulders, torso, and
hips, an increased freedom of movement of the
Copyright © 2012 Dance Heritage Coalition
pelvis and spine, an emphasis on percussion,
and the concept of polyrhythm in the body.
Facing financial difficulties and an increasingly
oppressive political climate, Dunham and her
company left the United States for a tour of
Mexico in 1947. Though Dunham would
occasionally return to perform in Las Vegas
nightclubs or give short runs on Broadway, she
spent most of the next fifteen years touring
Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Australia.
International audiences loved her work, leading
the Chicago Daily News to proclaim in 1949 that
Dunham was “sweeping Europe in a way that
tops even Isadora Duncan.”1 In 1951, she
purchased a twenty-acre estate in Haiti,
Habitation Leclerc, which would become her
second home for many years.
Though always politically engaged offstage,
Dunham rarely addressed social issues directly
in her choreography. A notable exception was
Southland, which Dunham premiered on
December 9, 1950, in Santiago, Chile. In the
ballet, set in the American South, a white
woman falsely accuses a black field hand of
rape, leading to his lynching by an angry mob.
State Department officials in Santiago, greatly
upset by Dunham’s frank depiction of American
racism during a tense Cold War moment,
suppressed further publicity about Southland
and instructed U.S. embassies throughout Latin
America to pressure her not to perform the
piece again (Dee Das, 8). Though Dunham kept
the work under wraps for a few years, she
revived it in January, 1953, in Paris, France,
before acceding to her dancers’ wishes not to
perform such an emotionally difficult and
traumatizing ballet (Hill, 6).
Financially pressed, Dunham dissolved the
company in 1958, 1960, 1962, and for good in
1964. During the first hiatus, she wrote A Touch
of Innocence (1959), a memoir of her childhood
in Joliet. In 1964, she moved on to other
projects, including a position at Southern Illinois
University (SIU) in Carbondale, Illinois. Through
SIU, Dunham became involved in efforts to
3
revitalize nearby East St. Louis and founded the
Performing Arts Training Center (P.A.T.C.) there
in 1967. Within a few years, P.A.T.C. included a
wide array of courses for college credit and a
student dance company. She also maintained a
longstanding commitment to the people of
Haiti; at age eighty-two, she staged a hunger
strike to protest the U.S. treatment of Haitian
boat refugees. Dunham passed away just one
month shy of her ninety-seventh birthday on
May 21, 2006 in New York. Because of her
artistry, scholarship, and sustained commitment
to both education and activism, Dunham has
left an enduring legacy in the field.
Marymount Manhattan College, and Barnard
College.
NOTES
1. The Chicago Daily News article is from a
scrapbook housed in the Katherine
Dunham Papers at the Special
Collections Research Center of
Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
For a complete listing of Katherine
Dunham archives, see Archives.
For full citations to works referenced in this
essay, as well as select additional resources, see
Selected Resources for Further Research:
Books and Articles.
Joanna Dee Das is a PhD candidate in history at
Columbia University, where she is writing her
dissertation on the life and work of Katherine
Dunham. In 2009, she processed the Katherine
Dunham Papers at the Missouri History
Museum Library and Research Center, which
enabled those archives to become available to
the public. She has authored essays on
Katherine Dunham and Aida Overton Walker for
the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism and
is editing a series of interviews with Broadway
artists for the journal Studies in Musical
Theatre. Her scholarship has been supported by
Columbia’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and
Race, a Victor Barnouw Fellowship, and a Jacob
K. Javits Fellowship. In addition to her research,
she has guest lectured at Harvard University,
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