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| 23/5/06 |
Katherine Dunham dies at age 96: Promoted Haitian Dance |
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The Dunham Method is based on Haitian Dance, no one did more to promote Haitian dance, drummers and dancers internationally than Katherine Dunham Date: 23 May 2006 01:17:55 BDT To: ezilidanto@lists.riseup.net Reply-To: erzilidanto@yahoo.com ************************ Dunham’s bio: www.pbs.org/wnet/freetodance/biographies/dunham.html -Katherine Dunham, Dance Pioneer, Dies at 96 By JACK ANDERSON, NYT,May 22, 2006 – Dancer Katherine Dunham Dies at Age 96, By SAMANTHA GROSS |Associated Press Writer – Katherine Dunham was dancer, activist, teacher – Dunham’s bio: www.pbs.org/wnet/freetodance/biographies/dunham.html – A Tale of Two Pioneers By Zita Allen ************************************************************** An Appreciation Photos and source: Whatever else Katherine Dunham was in her long and productive life, which ended on Sunday at 96, she was a radiantly beautiful woman whose warmth and sense of self spread like honey on the paths before her. How could anyone be stopped by the color of her skin after her invincibly lush sensuality and witty intelligence had seduced audiences on Broadway, in Hollywood films and in immensely popular dance shows that toured the world? And how could anyone cram black American dance into one or two conveniently narrow categories ? or for that matter ignore the good strong roots that would one day grow green stems and leaves ? with the vision of her company’s lavishly theatrical African and Caribbean dance revues in mind? Miss Dunham was one of the first American artists to focus on black dance and dancers as prime material for the stage. She burst into public consciousness in the 1940's, at a time when opportunities were increasing for black performers in mainstream theater and film, at least temporarily. But there was little middle ground there between the exotic and the demeaning everyday stereotypes. Ms. Dunham’s dance productions were certainly exotic, and sometimes fell into uncomfortable clichés. But a 1987 look at her work, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s “Magic of Katherine Dunham” program, confirmed that she also evoked ordinary lives that were lived with ordinary dignity. Miss Dunham, as she was universally known, was by no means the only dance artist to push for the recognition of black dance in the 1940's, when Pearl Primus pushed, too, though a great deal less glamorously. But though Miss Dunham’s academic credentials as an anthropologist were impeccable, including a doctorate from the University of Chicago, it was her gift for seduction that helped most to pave the way for choreographers like Donald McKayle, Talley Beatty and Alvin Ailey, who were the first wave of what is today an established and influential part of the larger world of American modern dance. Ailey’s first encounter with her, as a newly stage-struck boy in his mid-teens, says a great deal about Miss Dunham’s appeal. Intrigued by handbills advertising her 1943 “Tropical Revue,” he ventured into the Biltmore Theater in downtown Los Angeles, his hometown, where it was playing. There he was plunged into a world of color, light and heat that was populated by highly trained dancers with a gift for powerful immediacy, who were dressed in subtle, stylish costumes designed by John Pratt, Miss Dunham’s husband. After the show, Ailey followed the crowd making its way backstage to her dressing room and was again stunned when the door opened on a vision of beautiful hanging fabrics and carpeting, paintings, books, flowers and baskets of fruit. And there was La Dunham, dressed in vividly colored silks and exuding irresistible gaiety and warmth. Ailey returned to the show several times a week, let into the theater by the Dunham dancers who had looked so unapproachably exotic on that first backstage visit. And he was still more than a little in love with her when he invited her to create for his company “The Magic of Katherine Dunham,” a program of pieces that had not been seen for a quarter-century. Miss Dunham’s dancers, who remained close to her and to one another throughout her life, swarmed into the studios to help her work with the young performers. Most of the Ailey dancers did not appreciate Miss Dunham’s iron perfectionism or the unusual demands of her technique, a potent but challenging blend of Afro-Caribbean, ballet and modern dance. And she was not the easiest of women. I remember speaking with her before a public interview we were to do in April 1993. Addicted to CNN, she had just learned of the fiery, tragic end to the F.B.I.’s seige of the Branch Davidian compound in in Waco, Tex., that morning, and that was all that she could talk about, off and on the stage, despite her promises to discuss her work. Her horror was real, as was her sense of social justice. She has been criticized for not denouncing the Duvaliers for their dictatorship in Haiti, where she owned a home. But she had also sponsored a medical clinic in Port-au-Prince, and she stayed on for many years in desolate, impoverished East St. Louis, Ill., where she established a museum of artifacts pertaining to her career and taught local children including Jackie Joyner-Kersee, the Olympic long jumper, and the filmmakers Reginald and Warrington Hudlin. “I was trying to steer them into something more constructive than genocide,” she said of the children in a 1991 interview with me in The New York Times. “Everyone needs, if not a culture hero, a culturally heroic society. There is nothing stronger in a man than the need to grow.” That idealistic, eloquent self was infused with a streak of no-nonsense practicality. “I don’t like that ‘accept,’ “ Miss Dunham, still a vibrant beauty at 91, said during a Times interview six years ago in response to a middle-aged visitor who insisted on talking to her about the acceptance and embrace of old age. “I would just let the whole thing go. Just be there for it, centimeter by centimeter.” Then it was time for the photo session. Her eyes seemed to widen even more invitingly and her gaze to grow even warmer as she looked into the eye of the camera and asked, “Did you ever see photographs of elderly divas trying to look sexy?” *********************** 05/22/2006 00:18:49 EST NEW YORK – Katherine Dunham, a pioneering dancer and choreographer, author and civil rights activist who left Broadway to teach culture in one of America’s poorest cities, has died. She was 96. Dunham died Sunday at the Manhattan assisted living facility where she lived, said Charlotte Ottley, executive liaison for the organization that preserves her artistic estate. The cause of death was not immediately known. Dunham was perhaps best known for bringing African and Caribbean influences to the European-dominated dance world. In the late 1930s, she established the nation’s first self-supporting all-black modern dance group. “We weren’t pushing `Black is Beautiful,’ we just showed it,” she later wrote. During her career, Dunham choreographed “Aida” for the Metropolitan Opera and musicals such as “Cabin in the Sky” for Broadway. She also appeared in several films, including “Stormy Weather” and “Carnival of Rhythm.” Her dance company toured internationally from the 1940s to the ‘60s, visiting 57 nations on six continents. Her success was won in the face of widespread discrimination, a struggle Dunham championed by refusing to perform at segregated theaters. For her endeavors, Dunham received 10 honorary doctorates, the Presidential Medal of the Arts, the Albert Schweitzer Prize at the Kennedy Center Honors, and membership in the French Legion of Honor, as well as major honors from Brazil and Haiti. “She is one of the very small handful of the most important people in the dance world of the 20th century,” said Bonnie Brooks, chairman of the dance department at Columbia College in Chicago. “And that’s not even mentioning her work in civil rights, anthropological research and for humanity in general.” After 1967, Dunham lived most of each year in predominantly black East St. Louis, Ill., where she struggled to bring the arts to a Mississippi River city of burned-out buildings and high crime. She set up an eclectic compound of artists from around the globe, including Harry Belafonte. Among the free classes offered were dance, African hair-braiding and woodcarving, conversational Creole, Spanish, French and Swahili and more traditional subjects such as aesthetics and social science. Dunham also offered martial arts training in hopes of getting young, angry males off the street. Her purpose, she said, was to steer the residents of East St. Louis “into something more constructive than genocide.” Government cuts and a lack of private funding forced her to scale back her programs in the 1980s. Despite a constant battle to pay bills, Dunham continued to operate a children’s dance workshop and a museum. Plagued by arthritis and poverty in the latter part of her life, Dunham made headlines in 1992 when she went on a 47-day hunger strike to protest U.S. policy that repatriated Haitian refugees. “It’s embarrassing to be an American,” Dunham said at the time. Dunham’s New York studio attracted illustrious students like Marlon Brando and James Dean who came to learn the “Dunham Technique,” which Dunham herself explained as “more than just dance or bodily executions. It is about movement, forms, love, hate, death, life, all human emotions.” In her later years, she depended on grants and the kindness of celebrities, artists and former students to pay for her day-to-day expenses. Will Smith and Harry Belafonte were among those who helped her catch up on bills, Ottley said. “She didn’t end up on the street though she was one step from it,” Ottley said. “She has been on the edge and survived it all with dignity and grace.” Dunham was married to theater designer John Thomas Pratt for 49 years before his death in 1986. Copyright 2006 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. ***************************** Katherine Dunham, the dancer, choreographer, teacher and anthropologist whose pioneering work introduced much of the black heritage in dance to the stage, died on Sunday at her home in Manhattan. She was 96. Her death was confirmed by Dr. Glory Van Scott, a friend and former Dunham dancer. Miss Dunham also had homes in East St. Louis, Ill., where she ran inner-city cultural programs for decades, and in Port au Prince, Haiti. By creating popular and glamorous revues based on African and Caribbean folklore, Miss Dunham acquainted audiences, both on Broadway and around the world, with the historical roots of black dance. In the late 1930's she founded the nation’s first self-supporting black modern dance group, one that visited more than 50 countries on six continents. Her achievements came at a time of widespread racial discrimination, which she fought against, refusing to perform at segregated theaters on tours of the South. “We weren’t pushing ‘Black is Beautiful,’ we just showed it,” she once wrote. One of her works, “Southland,” depicted a lynching. Miss Dunham also became attached to Haiti and its culture, first arriving there as a young anthropologist. She later became a priestess of the Vaudun religion. In 1992, at the age of 82 and suffering from arthritis, she staged a much-publicized 47-day hunger strike to protest the United States’s repatriation of Haitian refugees. In East St. Louis, she found talented young people living in one of the nation’s most destitute areas and turned them into dancers. Describing her work there, she said, “It is our aim here to socialize the young and old through ‘culturization,’ to make the individual aware of himself and his environment, to create a desire to be alive.” Miss Dunham was a recipient of some of the most prestigious awards in the arts, including the Presidential Medal of the Arts, the Albert Schweitzer prize (presented at a 1979 gala at Carnegie Hall), Kennedy Center Honors and membership in the French Legion of Honor. In her dance technique, Miss Dunham emphasized the isolation of individual parts of the body. Some of her concepts continue to be taught at modern-dance schools across America. Her work was an important influence on Alvin Ailey, among other contemporary choreographers. George Balanchine cast Miss Dunham in a major role in “Cabin in the Sky,” a Broadway musical starring Ethel Waters that he staged and choreographed in 1940. She then went to Hollywood and danced in and choreographed the movies “Carnival of Rhythm” (1941), “Star-Spangled Rhythm” (1942) and “Stormy Weather” (1943), among others. It was in the 40's that Miss Dunham developed the fast-paced shows for which she was celebrated. “Tropical Revue,” successfully produced on Broadway in 1943, later toured the nation to much acclaim. Its sensuality also drew complaints, and it was cut, and finally closed, in Boston. But as the dance historian Margaret Lloyd noted, the censors “ordered out not the silly vaudeville bits, not the occasional leer or calculated animality, but the solemn, sacred ‘Rites de Passage’ “ ? a coming-of-age ceremony that was one of Miss Dunham’s most serious pieces. Miss Dunham was born on June 22, 1909, in Glen Ellyn, Ill. Her father, Albert Millard Dunham, was a descendant of slaves from Madagascar and West Africa. Her French Canadian mother, Fanny June Taylor, died when Miss Dunham was young. Her father then married Annette Poindexter, a schoolteacher from Iowa, and moved his family to predominantly white Joliet, Ill., where he ran a dry-cleaning business. Always interested in the theater, Miss Dunham shocked neighbors when, at 15, she announced she would stage a “cabaret party” to aid a Methodist Church. Later, she confessed that she had scarcely known what “cabaret” meant. Miss Dunham attended Joliet Junior College and the University of Chicago, where she received bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in anthropology. She also studied dance in Chicago with Ludmilla Speranzeva and Mark Turbyfill, a choreographer and poet, with whom she established the short-lived Ballet Nègre in 1930. Ruth Page, a prominent Chicago choreographer, cast her in “La Guiablesse,” a ballet based on Martinique folklore that was performed at the Chicago Civic Opera House in 1933. The following year, Miss Speranzeva helped Miss Dunham establish the Chicago Negro School of Ballet and a company, the Negro Dance Group, which evolved into the Katherine Dunham Dance Company. ***************************** By Sid Smith She would deserve acclaim if she mastered only one of her many areas of endeavor. But Katherine Dunham, a Chicago area native, conquered and innovatively synthesized them all ? serious dance, movies, Broadway shows, field anthropology and social activism. Miss Dunham, 96, died Sunday at an assisted living facility in New York City of immediately undetermined cause. Decades before the civil rights movement, she helped pioneer the path for African-Americans in the serious arts. “It’s impossible to reduce her importance and contribution to one or two things,” said Bonnie Brooks, chair of the dance department at Columbia College in Chicago. “She introduced important physical innovation to dance, but she was also an anthropologist, an educator and a civil rights leader. She broke ground and set examples.” As an undergraduate in the 1930s at the University of Chicago, Miss Dunham briefly sought to follow in her brother’s footsteps and major in philosophy. “I just couldn’t make it,” she told the Tribune in 1988. It was a rare failure. Hers was one of the most unusual and eclectic public careers of the 20th Century, and one of the boldest. During the Depression, when white males struggled financially, Miss Dunham managed a college degree, undertook graduate work, devised her own African-influenced dance technique, formed her own troupe and worked with George Balanchine on Broadway in “Cabin in the Sky.” Hollywood beckoned. “The film work meant I had a way of keeping the company together,” she said. She choreographed “Pardon My Sarong” and won jobs for her entire troupe in “Stormy Weather.” Miss Dunham was born in Glen Ellyn in 1909, according to the International Encyclopedia of Dance, but her family moved when she was 7 to Joliet, where her father operated a dry cleaning business. She and her brother put themselves through school. After moving from philosophy to anthropology, Miss Dunham fell under the influence of Margaret Mead and journeyed to the West Indies to study acculturation, the imposing of a colonial culture on a native one. With dance, Miss Dunham managed the process in reverse, grafting ethnic folk moves onto concert dance. “Anthropology,” she said, “taught me the relationship between form and function. It also gave me a way to enter into the life of the people, to witness their voodoo and other secret ceremonies.” She studied with Chicagoan Ruth Page, and Miss Dunham’s first public performance, called “A Negro Rhapsody,” took place at the Chicago Beaux Arts Theater in 1934. She earned a degree in anthropology in 1936 and, in 1938, became director of ballet for the Federal Theatre Project here. After moving to New York, she maintained her troupe for 30 years, creating more than 90 works, touring the U.S., breaking racial barriers in the South and fostering what became known as “the Katherine Dunham technique.” In the ‘40s, she founded a New York arts school, where James Dean, Marlon Brando and Eartha Kitt would eventually study. After her troupe disbanded in 1963, Miss Dunham turned increasingly to education. Beginning in the late’60s, Miss Dunham worked with Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville in a program to reach gang youths through arts instruction. A center in East St. Louis, where she lived for a number of years, bears her name. In 1992, she embarked on a dangerous, 47-day hunger strike to draw attention to the plight of Haitian refugees. She was 82. Miss Dunham was married to theater designer John Thomas Pratt for 49 years until his death in 1986. Her honors and awards include the Presidential Medal of Arts, the Southern Cross of Brazil, the Grand Cross of Haiti, the University of Chicago Alumni Association’s Professional Achievement Award, the Kennedy Center Honors, the French Legion of Honor, the NAACP Lifetime Achievement Award and the Urban League’s Lifetime Achievement Award. She was the first African-American to choreograph for the Metropolitan Opera and to win the Kennedy Center honor in dance. The Library of Congress stores a 1,000-piece collection of Dunham photographs and memorabilia. She told an interviewer in 2004, “My job, I think now, is to make a useful legacy. And that legacy is more than being just a dancer.” ***************************** Born: June 22, 1909 The West Indian experience changed forever the focus of Dunham’s life (eventually she would live in Haiti half of the time and become a priestess in the “vodoun” religion), and caused a profound shift in her career. This initial fieldwork provided the nucleus for future researches and began a lifelong involvement with the people and dance of Haiti. From this Dunham generated her master’s thesis (Northwestern University, 1947) and more fieldwork. She lectured widely, published numerous articles, and wrote three books about her observations: JOURNEY TO ACCOMPONG (1946), THE DANCES OF HAITI (her master’s thesis, published in 1947), and ISLAND POSSESSED (1969), underscoring how African religions and rituals adapted to the New World. And, importantly for the development of modern dance, her fieldwork began her investigations into a vocabulary of movement that would form the core of the Katherine Dunham Technique. What Dunham gave modern dance was a coherent lexicon of African and Caribbean styles of movement — a flexible torso and spine, articulated pelvis and isolation of the limbs, a polyrhythmic strategy of moving — which she integrated with techniques of ballet and modern dance. When she returned to Chicago in late 1937, Dunham founded the Negro Dance Group, a company of black artists dedicated to presenting aspects of African-American and African-Caribbean dance. Immediately she began incorporating the dances she had learned into her choreography. Invited in 1937 to be part of a notable New York City concert, “Negro Dance Evening,” she premiered “Haitian Suite,” excerpted from choreography she was developing for the longer “L’Ag’Ya.” In 1937-1938 as dance director of the Negro Unit of the Federal Theatre Project in Chicago, she made dances for “Emperor Jones” and “Run Lil’ Chillun,” and presented her first version of “L’Ag’Ya” on January 27, 1938. Based on a Martinique folktale (ag’ya is a Martinique fighting dance), “L’Ag’Ya” is a seminal work, displaying Dunham’s blend of exciting dance-drama and authentic African-Caribbean material. Dunham moved her company to New York City in 1939, where she became dance director of the New York Labor Stage, choreographing the labor-union musical “Pins and Needles.” Simultaneously she was preparing a new production, “Tropics and Le Jazz Hot: From Haiti to Harlem.” It opened February 18, 1939, in what was intended to be a single weekend’s concert at the Windsor Theatre in New York City. Its instantaneous success, however, extended the run for ten consecutive weekends and catapulted Dunham into the limelight. In 1940 Dunham and her company appeared in the black Broadway musical, “Cabin in the Sky,” staged by George Balanchine, in which Dunham played the sultry siren Georgia Brown — a character related to Dunham’s other seductress, “Woman with a Cigar,” from her solo “Shore Excursion” in “Tropics.” That same year Dunham married John Pratt, a theatrical designer who worked with her in 1938 at the Chicago Federal Theatre Project, and for the next 47 years, until his death in 1986, Pratt was Dunham’s husband and her artistic collaborator. With “L’Ag’Ya” and “Tropics and Le Jazz Hot: From Haiti to Harlem,” Dunham revealed her magical mix of dance and theater — the essence of “the Dunham touch” — a savvy combination of authentic Caribbean dance and rhythms with the heady spice of American showbiz. Genuine folk material was presented with lavish costumes, plush settings, and the orchestral arrangements based on Caribbean rhythms and folk music. Dancers moved through fantastical tropical paradises or artistically designed juke-joints, while a loose storyline held together a succession of diverse dances. Dunham aptly called her spectacles “revues.” She choreographed more than 90 individual dances, and produced five revues, four of which played on Broadway and toured worldwide. Her most critically acclaimed revue was her 1946 “Bal Negre,” containing another Dunham dance favorite, “Shango,” based directly on “vodoun” ritual. If her repertory was diverse, it was also coherent. “Tropics and le Jazz Hot: From Haiti to Harlem” incorporated dances from the West Indies as well as from Cuba and Mexico, while the “Le Jazz Hot” section featured early black American social dances, such as the Juba, Cake Walk, Ballin’ the Jack, and Strut. The sequencing of dances, the theatrical journey from the tropics to urban black America implied — in the most entertaining terms — the ethnographic realities of cultural connections. In her 1943 “Tropical Revue,” she recycled material from the 1939 revue and added new dances, such as the balletic “Choros” (based on formal Brazilian quadrilles), and “Rites de Passage,” which depicted puberty rituals so explicitly sexual that the dance was banned in Boston. Beginning in the 1940s, the Katherine Dunham Dance Company appeared on Broadway and toured throughout the United States, Mexico, Latin America, and especially Europe, to enthusiastic reviews. In Europe Dunham was praised as a dancer and choreographer, recognized as a serious anthropologist and scholar, and admired as a glamorous beauty. Among her achievements was her resourcefulness in keeping her company going without any government funding. When short of money between engagements, Dunham and her troupe played in elegant nightclubs, such as Ciro’s in Los Angeles. She also supplemented her income through film. Alone, or with her company, she appeared in nine Hollywood movies and in several foreign films between 1941 and 1959, among them CARNIVAL OF RHYTHM (1939), STAR-SPANGLED RHYTHM (1942), STORMY WEATHER (1943), CASBAH (1948), BOOTE E RIPOSTA (1950), and MAMBO (1954). In 1945 Dunham opened the Dunham School of Dance and Theater (sometimes called the Dunham School of Arts and Research) in Manhattan. Although technique classes were the heart of the school, they were supplemented by courses in humanities, philosophy, languages, aesthetics, drama, and speech. For the next ten years many African-American dances of the next generation studied at her school, then passed on Dunham’s technique to their students, situating it in dance mainstream (teachers such as Syvilla Fort, Talley Beatty, Lavinia Williams, Walter Nicks, Hope Clark, Vanoye Aikens, and Carmencita Romero; the Dunham technique has always been taught at the Alvin Ailey studios). During the 1940s and ‘50s, Dunham kept up her brand of political activism. Fighting segregation in hotels, restaurants and theaters, she filed lawsuits and made public condemnations. In Hollywood, she refused to sign a lucrative studio contract when the producer said she would have to replace some of her darker-skinned company members. To an enthusiastic but all-white audience in the South, she made an after-performance speech, saying she could never play there again until it was integrated. In São Paulo, Brazil, she brought a discrimination suit against a hotel, eventually prompting the president of Brazil to apologize to her and to pass a law that forbade discrimination in public places. In 1951 Dunham premiered “Southland,” an hour-long ballet about lynching, though it was only performed in Chile and Paris. Toward the end of the 1950s Dunham was forced to regroup, disband, and reform her company, according to the exigencies of her financial and physical health (she suffered from crippling knee problems). Yet she remained undeterred. In 1962 she opened a Broadway production, “Bambouche,” featuring 14 dancers, singers, and musicians of the Royal Troupe of Morocco, along with the Dunham company. The next year she choreographed the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of “Aida” — thereby becoming the Met’s first black choreographer. In 1965-1966, she was cultural adviser to the President of Senegal. She attended Senegal’s First World Festival of Negro Arts as a representative from the United States. Moved by the civil rights struggle and outraged by deprivations in the ghettos of East St. Louis, an area she knew from her visiting professorships at Southern Illinois University in the 1960s, Dunham decided to take action. In 1967 she opened the Performing Arts Training Center, a cultural program and school for the neighborhood children and youth, with programs in dance, drama, martial arts, and humanities. Soon thereafter she expanded the programs to include senior citizens. Then in 1977 she opened the Katherine Dunham Museum and Children’s Workshop to house her collections of artifacts from her travels and research, as well as archival material from her personal life and professional career. During the 1980s, Dunham received numerous awards acknowledging her contributions. These include the Albert Schweitzer Music Award for a life devoted to performing arts and service to humanity (1979); a Kennedy Center Honor’s Award (1983); the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award (1987); induction into the Hall of Fame of the National Museum of Dance in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. (1987). That same year Dunham directed the reconstruction of several of her works by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and “The Magic of Katherine Dunham opened Ailey’s 1987-1988 season. In February 1992, at the age of 82, Dunham again became the subject of international attention when she began a 47-day fast at her East St. Louis home. Because of her age, her involvement with Haiti, and the respect accorded her as an activist and artist, Dunham became the center of a movement that coalesced to protest the United States’ deportations of Haitian boat-refugees fleeing to the U.S. after the military overthrow of Haiti’s democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. She agreed to end her fast only after Aristide visited her and personally requested her to stop. Boldness has characterized Dunham’s life and career. And, although she was not alone, Dunham is perhaps the best known and most influential pioneer of black dance. Her synthesis of scholarship and theatricality demonstrated, incontrovertibly and joyously, that African-American and African-Caribbean styles are related and powerful components of dance in America. — Sally Sommer **************************** In the 1930s and ‘40s, Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus swept onstage and took American concert dance by storm. They were two women on a mission, each determined to continue a tradition, begun by a handful of pioneers, of exploring their rich heritage and highlighting its dignity, complexity, and power. Each would alter American concert dance forever. Dynamic but different, Dunham and Primus were choreographic change agents. Dunham charmed and dazzled audiences with brilliantly staged, exquisitely costumed, energetic productions based largely on ethnographic material gathered on field trips to Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad, and Martinique. Even their names were evocative — “L’Ag’Ya,” “Tango,” “Tropics and Le Jazz Hot.” Primus, on the other hand, went straight for the jugular with politically provocative, passionate pieces that propelled her dancing like a force of nature. Her early works had names like “Strange Fruit” and “Hard Time Blues” and drew on research in the Deep South. Her later pieces would reflect numerous field trips, capturing the intricacies and subtleties of southern culture while re-creating the ambiance of African villages. Both Dunham and Primus were fully committed to the emerging concert dance art form and its power to communicate as the stage became a political platform, and to their work “as a balm for the wounds inflicted by racial discrimination.” A brief survey would reveal two women whose careers thrived in decades bracketed on one end by the flourishing Harlem Renaissance and the New Deal, and on the other by the turmoil of the emerging civil rights era. America was in a state of flux, and a growing progressive movement was provoking change. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) took President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to task for failing to support civil rights legislation even as the mounting tally of indignities and lynchings served as proof of how desperately it was needed. Contralto Marian Anderson, when denied the opportunity to sing at Washington, D.C.’s Constitution Hall by the lily-white Daughters of the American Revolution, was invited by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to perform instead on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. A throng of 75,000 turned out for the occasion. FDR’s Federal Theatre Project formed a Negro Unit that provided employment and opportunity for countless out-of-work African-American artists. The theatrical wunderkind Orson Welles presented an adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” at Harlem’s Lafayette Theatre with an all-black cast. Paradigms were shifting. Times were changing. Enter Katherine Dunham. Picture a pretty woman with sparkling eyes and skin the color of café au lait, gliding across the stage in a sea of ruffles disguised as a John Pratt costume, smiling seductively, shaking her bare shoulders, swishing her hips and flicking her skirt to reveal long brown thighs. The propulsive rhythm of African drums fills the theater. The stage, magically transformed into a Caribbean village, is ringed by a semicircle of dancers and drummers. Center stage, two bare-chested men square off like rams fighting over turf. Bobbing and weaving, they wait for the right time to strike before unleashing a surprise flurry of karate kicks aimed with the precision of a champion boxer’s one-two punch. This is Katherine Dunham’s “L’Ag’Ya,” based on a form of dance/combat Dunham first witnessed while doing ethnographic research in Martinique on a Rosenwald Fellowship. In Martinique, Brazil, and other places, African slaves once used these martial arts dances to prepare for uprisings, undetected right under their master’s nose. Choreographed in 1938 for the Federal Theatre Project in Chicago, in the 1940s, Dunham’s “L’Ag’Ya” was greeted with thunderous applause and critical praise that propelled her and her company into stardom. In 1939, Dunham created dances for “Pins and Needles,” a production of the ILGWU at the New York’s Labor Stage. Dancer, choreographer, anthropologist, and teacher Katherine Dunham was born in Chicago in 1914; received a M.A. in anthropology from the University of Chicago, where she studied with Robert Redfield; and did special studies in West Indies research at Northwestern University, under Melville Herskovits. Two Rosenwald Fellowships and a Rockefeller Fellowship financed extensive anthropological study in the Caribbean, which generated not only a rich repertoire of dances but also an impressive roster of books, including THE DANCES OF HAITI, JOURNEY TO ACCOMPONG, A TOUCH OF INNOCENCE, and ISLAND POSSESSED, as well as a number of articles in ESQUIRE, under the nom de plume K. Dunn, and other magazines. A member of the Women’s Honorary Scientific Fraternity of the University of Chicago and the Royal Society of Anthropologists of London, Dunham was also made a Chevalier — Legion d’Honneur et Merit of Haiti, where her immersion into the culture and the Vodoun religion led to her initiation and designation as a mambo, the highest rank for a woman. Dunham’s approach to dance was unique, so she had to create a system of movement and a technique for teaching it that would enable dancers to handle her repertoire, in much the same way as early American modern choreographers/dancers Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, Jose Limon, and Lester Horton developed their styles. Dunham Technique is remarkably difficult — an eclectic fusion of movement researched in Jamaica, Martinique, and Haiti with ballet and modern dance, blended into a system of body isolation and syncopation that gives the body an impressive range of movement. According to VeVe A. Clark in her essay, “Katherine Dunham: Method Dancing or Memory of Difference,” “The memory of forgotten dances from the Caribbean appears cross-culturally in ‘L’Ag’Ya’ through sequences combining ballet, modern, and Caribbean dances such as the habanera (Cuba), majumba (Brazil), mazouk, beguine and ag’ya (Martinique).” “Stylization” of regional dances seemed an inappropriate term to describe Dunham’s method; it was nonetheless the rather negative assessment reproduced consistently in the critical literature from the 1940s through Alvin Ailey’s “Reconstructions” of the 1980s. “Contextualization” was the means by which Katherine Dunham taught three generations of performers from 1940 through 1965 to internalize dances as they were known in the contemporary Caribbean or in African America during the 1920s. In a sense, her dancers became repositories of memory. And, as Clark pointed out, so did her audiences. Dunham burst on the scene at a unique point in America’s social, political, and cultural history, in the wake of the cultural activity that had been devoted to the search for the New Negro and at a time just before the civil rights explosion. This era was a cauldron of ideas, with international resonance found in the emerging Negritude movement, which had coincided with the Harlem Renaissance. The movement would articulate challenging concepts of African-American identity and rock the foundations of America. Dance historian and critic Sally Banes noted, in DANCING WOMEN: FEMALE BODIES ON STAGE: “Searching for ‘an authentic’ African American dance that had not been either cheapened by minstrel show parody or ‘whitened’ through a segregated but syncretic American culture, she had found sources outside the United States that she felt would better capture the movement history of African Americans.” Dunham’s search had a unique dimension, because traditional European anthropologists exploring Third World cultures were obvious outsiders. The fact that Dunham was both an African American and a dancer, which in part presaged the subsequent increased presence of Third World anthropologists in the field, allowed her to become a more integrated part of the societies she was studying. The complexity and difficulty of her mission were evident from the early days of her career as a young anthropology student under Melville Hersksovits at the University of Chicago. She juggled ballet classes with Ludmilla Speranzeva and Mark Turbyfill, debuted in 1933 with the Chicago Opera in Ruth Page’s “La Guiablesse,” and started her own company and school, the short-lived Ballet Negre She flexed her muscles as the dance director for the Negro Unit of the Chicago branch of the Federal Theatre Project shortly after returning from her fruitful field trips to the Caribbean. In “Free To Dance,” former Dunham dancer and teacher Ruth Beckford recalls the legend of Dunham’s taking off her “nice suit,” worn over a dance outfit, to do a spontaneous audition before the Rosenwald Foundation board when applying for the $2,000 or so that would finance her research. In 1937, her company appeared on the historic Negro Dance Evening at New York’s YMHA, which led to her premiere of “Tropics and Le Jazz Hot” at Broadway’s Windsor Theatre on February 18, 1940, in a one-night stand that turned into an three-month run. It launched a career that would include numerous Broadway performances, countless tours abroad, and appearances in Hollywood films such as STORMY WEATHER and CABIN IN THE SKY. But it also would mean continuously educating not only her dancers but the public as well. The creation of the Dunham Technique — the development, in 1945, of a school where dancers learned anthropology, philosophy, sociology, and languages as well as tap, ballet, folk, and primitive dance percussion, eukinetics, and body training for actors — hints at the scope of Dunham’s mission as she saw it. Its impact was profound and influenced many performers who would go on to make their mark in dance and other arts — Vanoye Aikens, Talley Beatty, Ruth Beckford, Marlon Brando, Hope Clarke, Janet Collins, Jean-Leon Destine, Lucille Ellis, Syvilla Fort, Peter Gennaro, Rudi Gernreich, Carlton Johnson, Eartha Kitt, Claude Merchant, Lenwood Morris, Pearl Reynolds, Jaime Rogers, and Lavinia Williams. The mission was not easy when many in the audience, like NEW YORK TIMES dance critic John Martin, while unmistakable fans, insisted on viewing Dunham’s work through a lens that distorted even as it applauded. While declaring in a 1940 review of “Tropics and Le Jazz Hot” that Dunham’s “arrival on the scene” made “the prospects for the development of a substantial Negro dance art begin to look decidedly bright,” Martin, with his limited vision, decreed what that dance art should be. “The essence of the Negro dance itself” would conform to his concept of the “Negro noble savage”: “There is nothing pretentious about it: it is not designed to delve into philosophy or psychology but to externalize the impulses of a high-spirited, rhythmic and gracious race.” Martin recognized that Dunham’s work was “tremendous, anthropological and ‘important’,” but assured his audiences that “it is also debonair and delightful, not to say daring and erotic.” While times were changing, Dunham, like Primus, was ahead of the curve. Sometimes these pioneers would have to patiently prepare their critics and admirers so they could catch up… ****************************** Books on Haitian Dance by Katherine Dunham: Island Possessed About this title: Just as surely as Haiti is “possessed” by the gods and spirits of vaudun (voodoo), the island “possessed” Katherine Dunham when she first went there in 1936 to study dance and ritual. In this book, Dunham reveals how her anthropological research, her work in dance, and her fascination for the people and cults of Haiti worked their spell, catapulting her into experiences that she was often lucky to survive. Here Dunham tells how the island came to be possessed by the demons of voodoo and other cults imported from various parts of Africa, as well as by the deep class divisions, particularly between blacks and mulattos, and the political hatred still very much in evidence today. Full of the flare and suspense of immersion in a strange and enchanting culture, “Island Possessed” is also a pioneering work in the anthropology of dance and a fascinating document on Haitian politics and voodoo. Dances of Haiti by Katherine Dunham (Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies |
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