Katherine Dunham

American dancer and anthropologist

• Born: June 22, 1909
• Birthplace: Glen Ellyn, Illinois
• Died: May 21, 2006
• Place of death: New York, New York

Katherine Dunham, an ethnologist-choreographer-dancer, served as a catalyst and creative force in theater and dance, translating cultural heritage through theater pieces. Her theories and techniques of movement are used by choreographers and dancers throughout the world.

Early Life

Katherine Dunham (DUHN-uhm) was born on June 22, 1909, to Fannie June Buckner, an assistant school principal of American Indian, French-Canadian, and African lineage, and Albert Millard Dunham, a man of Malagasy and Madagascar descent who was twenty years younger than his wife. The Dunhams lived in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, a white middle-class suburb. Katherine’s mother, who had five children from a previous marriage, became ill with cancer soon after Katherine’s birth and died when Katherine was four years old. Since the property holdings went to Fannie’s adult children after her death, Albert Dunham was left with few financial resources with which to cope with the responsibility of rearing Katherine and her ten-year-old brother, Albert, Jr. Her father sold his tailoring business and became a traveling salesman, leaving the children in the care of his relatives. First, the children lived with his sister Lulu, a beautician; later, they stayed with an aunt and uncle who directed musical shows and brought Katherine into direct contact with show-business people.

When her father remarried, Katherine and her family moved to Joliet, Illinois, where they operated a dry cleaning business. Her stepmother, Annette Poindexter, supported Katherine’s love of dance and performing by sewing her costumes and by sending her to piano and ballet classes. As a young girl, Katherine belonged to the Terpsichorean Club, a dance club that introduced her to modern dance techniques developed by Jacques Dalcroze (eurythmics) and Rudolph von Laban (Labanotation). She applied her learning when she organized a cabaret performance night in a rented Elks Hall to raise money for her church. Katherine prepared the program, organized the singers, selected the music, choreographed the dances, and performed, activities that mirrored her adult life. After high school she completed a course of study at Joliet Junior College.

Because of continual conflicts with her father, Katherine and her stepmother left home when Albert, Jr., went off to college at the University of Chicago during the Great Depression. With her brother’s help, Katherine found employment at a library, opened a dance studio that doubled as her apartment, and attended the University of Chicago. She studied modern dance and ballet, which led her to meet Ruth Page, the choreographer; Mark Turbyfill, the ballet instructor; and Nicholas Matsukas, cofounder of the Cube Theater, an interracial production company that included composer W. C. Handy, poet Langston Hughes, dramatist Ruth Attaway, sociologist St. Clair Drake, and performer Charles White. Dunham and Turbyfill formed a black dance group that debuted at the Beaux Arts Ball in 1931. In 1934, Dunham and her modern dance teacher, Ludmila Speranzeva, formed a company of seven women dancers for performances at the Chicago World’s Fair. Katherine’s performance with the Chicago Civic Opera increased the number of students in her dance company and led to an interview with the Rosenwald Foundation, since a prominent member of the audience was Mrs. Alfred Rosenwald Stern, who had been favorably impressed with Katherine’s abilities on stage.

Life’s Work

To prepare for a future that did not depend on her deteriorating knees, Dunham turned her attention to anthropology. Earning her bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees from the University of Chicago, Dunham was influenced by Robert Redfield, an anthropologist of folk and peasant societies; Charles Johnson, a noted sociologist and member of the Rosenwald Foundation; and Erich Fromm, a psychoanalyst. Her thesis, Dances of Haiti: Their Social Organization, Classification, Form and Function (1939), combined her love of dance with anthropology in a study of nonverbal communication through dance to ascertain the cultural traits and patterns of various peoples. With the help of her academic mentors, Dunham won a travel fellowship from the Julius Rosenwald Foundation to do anthropological fieldwork in the West Indies. To prepare for her fieldwork, she studied at Northwestern University with noted anthropologist Melville Herskovits, who taught her about West Indian customs, stratification, and social institutions; how to keep proper research records; and how to survive in a tropical climate. He also made contacts for her in the islands and within the social and political circles to which Dunham could turn in the future for financial and creative support. Many of her findings she published in scholarly journals and popular magazines, sometimes writing as “K. Dunn.”

In 1935, she did research among the Maroons of Accompong, Jamaica, which culminated in her book Journey to Accompong (1946). With the help of a Guggenheim Award in 1937, she investigated dance in Trinidad, Martinique, Jamaica, and Haiti. She continued her research in the field of dance and choreography as cultural and historical dimensions of African existence. Dunham believed that African and African diasporic cultures could be understood through motion, that dance was one of the African “survivalisms” of which scholars such as Herskovits spoke. Through her exposure of dances reflecting the African American experience, she made a major contribution to the theories of modern dance.

She returned to Chicago in 1938 and worked for the Work Progress Administration (WPA), developing the ballet L’Ag’Ya , based on a Martinique fighting dance that introduced a new body movement called the Biguine. In 1939, as the Federal Works Theater Project closed, she choreographed Pins and Needles, sponsored by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, and helped organize her professional dance company to perform Brazilian songs and dances in the first color short by Warner Bros., Carnival of Rhythm. Dunham shared choreography responsibilities with George Balanchine for the musical Cabin in the Sky, on Broadway and on tour in 1940.

During the years with the Federal Theater Project, she worked with John Pratt, a white stage and costume designer. Their interracial relationship upset coworkers and family, but she married Pratt on July 10, 1941, in a private ceremony in Mexico. He acted as her manager and creative partner until his death. Later, they adopted an infant, Marie Christine, in Paris in 1948. During World War II, she made a film with comedian Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, Star Spangled Rhythm (1942). When her husband was stationed in Virginia, Dunham choreographed Stormy Weather (1943) and founded the Dunham School of Arts and Research in New York. The Dunham School combined ballet with dances from Caribbean, African, Spanish, Asian, and Central European sources and provided lectures on form and space, choreography, anthropology, languages, and acting from such teachers as Lee Strasberg, Jose Ferrer, Margaret Mead, and Irene Hawthorne. This technique for training dancers, the “Dunham technique,” gained international acclaim, led to the development of schools throughout the world, and influenced dancers and actors such as Eartha Kitt, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Chita Rivera, Arthur Mitchell, Peter Gennaro, Rudi Genreich, and other famous performers, who were at one time members of Dunham’s dance company. Jazz musicians, such as Charles Mingus, often joined the school’s musicians in playing for the students. Eventually, her troupe became self-supporting through tours in Canada, Europe, Asia, and South America, and it became the first large troupe to appear in Las Vegas, where discrimination was a major problem for all traveling black entertainers. Their last performance took place in 1965 at the Apollo Theater in New York City.

Dunham fought racial discrimination throughout her life both in the United States and abroad. From 1939 to 1967, she toured the world, visiting fifty-seven countries, and learned about racial discrimination abroad. In her travels to Brazil, a country supposedly lacking color bars, she was refused accommodation at the Grande Hotel because of her color. Her mediation and threats of lawsuits generally resolved these incidents of racism. During World War II, in Lexington, Kentucky, she canceled her appearances when management refused to change segregated seating practices. She had housing problems when she produced musical revues for clubs on the Hollywood strip, and she faced strikes by the lighting and stage crews of a St. Louis theater when she was allowed to live in a midtown white hotel during the show’s tenure. On the eve of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board ofEducation decision, Cincinnati unions threatened the hotel where Dunham stayed in 1954 while her company appeared across the river in Covington, Kentucky. Her fight this time overturned the segregation law. Because of its theme of American lynchings, Dunham had to produce the ballet Southland outside the United States, in South America and in Paris.

During the 1940’s and 1950’s, Dunham appeared in Hollywood clubs; produced the musical revues Tropics, Le Jazz “Hot,” and Bal Negre; choreographed the musical Windy City; appeared in the film Casbah; and still managed to write. Her first book, Journey to Accompong, was hailed as a beautiful anthropological account. While recuperating from exhaustion in Kyoto, Japan, in 1958, she wrote an account of her early life, Touch of Innocence (1959).

The 1960’s brought Dunham both personal and professional gratification. She returned to Broadway as a performer and choreographer in Bamboche!(1962), and she choreographed the film Green Mansions (1959) for director Mel Ferrer. Other films that she either appeared in or choreographed include the Abbott and Costello comedy Pardon My Sarong (1942), Mambo (1954), and Música en la noche (1958). She also developed Ode to Taylor Jones, to honor a black activist of the Civil Rights movement, and in 1962 she became the first African American to choreograph for New York’s Metropolitan Opera when she choreographed Aida. In 1963, Dunham became the technical and cultural adviser to the president of Senegal, training the members of the Senegal National Ballet.

The 1960’s also brought Dunham’s influence to the campuses of Southern Illinois University (Carbondale, Alton, Edwardsville, and East St. Louis). Her brother-in-law, Davis Pratt, a professor of design at the Carbondale campus, helped bring her in as the artist-in-residence of Southern Illinois University’s Fine Arts Department before her husband died in 1968. She established the Performing Arts Training Center (PATC) at the “mother campus” at Edwardsville, and she directed the Katherine Dunham Center for Performing Arts from the two-story Dunham home near the East St. Louis campus. Through integrated educational experiences in the arts, she worked with that city’s young black militants in attempts to decrease alienation and violence and promote cultural pride and understanding, a process she called “socialization through the arts.” Her interest extended to the elderly through Senior Citizens for the Performing Arts, a program enabling seniors to attend cultural events.

Dunham’s efforts to meet the needs of the East St. Louis community continued after her death, through her archives and costumes, which are housed in the Katherine Dunham Museum in East St. Louis. Videotapes of her master classes show Dunham reconstructing her dances and analyzing their meaning. The museum also features Haitian and African history and art.

This late stage in her career brought her many honors. In 1968, she received the Professional Achievement Award from the University of Chicago Alumni Association. In 1974, she was inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame in Oakland, California, and received a proclamation from Coleman Young, the mayor of Detroit. In 1979, she received the Albert Schweitzer Music Award at Carnegie Hall “for a life’s work dedicated to music and devoted to humanity.” In 1983, Dunham received the Kennedy Center Honors Award. She received the Scripps American Dance Festival Award, the Presidential Medal of the Arts, the French Legion of Honor, Southern Cross of Brazil, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Lifetime Achievement Award, and Urban League’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

She remained engaged in social issues throughout the 1990’s. It was her celebrated hunger strike in 1992 that revived her celebrity. In February she began a forty-seven-day fast to protest the United States’ policy on refugees from war-wracked Haiti, refugees who were being repatriated upon reaching the American coast. Comedian Dick Gregory led a group watching over her, while many celebrities visited to support her ordeal. She abandoned the hunger strike only after exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and Jesse Jackson appealed to her in person to do so. Aristide later gave her Haitian citizenship and dubbed her the spiritual mother of his country. She also accepted teaching posts and lectures. In 1994, for instance, she served as artist-in-residence at the University of Hawaii.

In 2000 the Dance Heritage Coalition placed her among the first one hundred of America’s irreplaceable dance treasures. Academia also recognized her influence: She received an honorary doctorate of fine arts from the University of Southern California (1995) and Harvard University (2002), and in 2005 the Congress of Research in Dance gave her an award for her leadership in dance research. Dunham became a member of the American Guild of Musical Artists, the American Guild of Variety Artists, the American Federation of Radio Artists, Actors’ Equity, the Negro Actors’ Guild, the Women’s Honorary Scientific Fraternity at the University of Chicago, and the Royal Society of Anthropologists in London.

She remained much beloved by colleagues and fans. In 1999 her many students, fellow dancers, and friends threw a large ninetieth birthday party for her in East St. Louis, during which the Illinois Arts Council announced that it was awarding her a grant and the Smithsonian Institution presented her with a Smith Award. In 2003 New York City accorded her a three-day tribute of special performances at Symphony Space.

Dunham was honored by various international leaders in addition to Aristide. She kept an altar to the deity Yemanja in her home and practiced vaudun, demonstrating the influence of Haiti on her life. She received the medal of the Chevalier of the Legion of Honor from Haitian President Dumarsais Estimé in 1948. In 1961, she became a Commander of the Legion of Honor of Haiti. In 1972, she received a Ribbon and Iron Cross and was named High Commander by Haitian president François “Papa Doc” Duvalier. She was recognized at the Festival of Arts in Dakar in 1966 for her service to the president of Senegal, Leopold Senghor.

Still active at ninety-five, Dunham elicited happy applause from a Barnard College audience in 2004 when she told them that she intended to live to be one hundred and forty years old because there was so much left to do. However, she was already confined to a wheelchair and was frail. She died in her sleep on May 21, 2006, in New York City.

Significance

Dunham’s primary influence was her research into and subsequent use of African-based rhythms and dance in her approximately one hundred choreographed works, including Tropics (1937), Haitian Suite (1937), Island Songs (1938), Plantation Dances (1940), Bal Negre (1948), Afrique (1949), Spirituals (1951), Jazz Finale (1955), and Diamond Thief (1962). Her analysis of dance and her role in understanding the African influence can be found in her scholarly and autobiographical works: Journey to Accompong, The Dances of Haiti (1947), A Touch of Innocence, Island Possessed (1969), and Kasamance (1974). The Dunham technique of “dance isolation” and the black dance style of movement influenced students throughout the world.

Bibliography

Akinyemi, Omonike. “Dunham Speaks from the Heart.” Dance Magazine, January, 1993. One of the best interviews with the dance legend, this piece includes Dunham’s discussion of her life’s work and her hopes for the future especially her interest in the welfare of the Haitian people.

Aschenbrenner, Joyce. Katherine Dunham: A Dancing Life. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. A fellow anthropologist and former student of Dunham, Aschenbrenner stresses the great dancer’s contribution to her art and to American culture in general in this biography, which offers many photographs of Dunham performing. She carefully explains the Dunham technique as part of Dunham’s commitment to education.

Beckford, Ruth. Katherine Dunham: A Biography. New York: Marcel Dekker, 1979. Beckford, a colleague and former Dunham dancer, wrote this biography at Dunham’s request to ensure Dunham’s place in dance history. Written from the perspective of a trained dancer evaluating the importance of her mentor, the biography gives a personal look at Dunham’s life, interests, and achievements. Many photographs from Dunham’s personal collection enhance the narrative.

Clark, VèVè A., and Sara E. Johnson, eds. Kaiso! Writings by and About Katherine Dunham. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. Essays in this collection analyze specific aspects of Dunham’s career from the perspectives of different writers who have known or studied with her, including Zora Neale Hurston and Eartha Kitt, but there is also an abundance of excerpts from Dunham’s own books, essays, and poems about social causes as well as dance. Also offers a biographical chronology, photographs, and bibliography.

Harnan, Terry. African Rhythm American Dance: A Biography of Katherine Dunham. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974. This biography examines Dunham’s linking of African dance and African cultural history in the Americas.

Lanker, Brian. I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America. Edited by Barbara Summers. New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1989. These photographic essays include an examination of Dunham’s philosophy about the African cultural connections in motion.

Perron, Wendy. “Katherine Dunham: One-Woman Revolution.” Dance Magazine, August 2000. This short article deftly describes Dunham’s pervasive influence on American dance and records her views about her art, all based on an interview. With photos.