Dancer Katherine Dunham; Formed Black Ballet Troupe

In the 1940s and 1950s, she toured 57 countries under the direction of impresario Sol Hurok, who insured her legs for $250,000. Her hard schedule led to multiple knee surgeries and ended long travels with her Katherine Dunham Dance Co.

From 1943 to 1967, when she ran out of private and corporate funding, Ms. Dunham oversaw a self-named performing arts school. She promoted a learning technique that fused music, languages and culture, later saying that her focus was "more than just dance or bodily executions. It is about movement, forms, love, hate, death, life, all human emotions."

The school also became famous for its drop-in artists, including Marlon Brando on the bongos and Charles Mingus on bass.

In 1967, she received an offer to teach at a Southern Illinois University campus near East St. Louis. She set up a dance-training program for young people and was especially hopeful that she could use art to keep gang members from pursuing a violent future. She was briefly charged with disorderly conduct in 1967 when she went to ask police why one youth was being held.

Ms. Dunham's last major choreography was in 1972 for Scott Joplin's opera "Treemonisha." She collected numerous honors, including the Albert Schweitzer Award for humanitarian achievements (1979), a Kennedy Center Honor (1983) and the National Medal of Arts (1989).

Long widowed and unable to manage her finances, Ms. Dunham was living in near destitution by the late 1990s. Friends moved her to New York for adequate care. In recent years, she was the subject of retrospectives from Alvin Ailey's dance company and feted by universities and arts groups. She continued to make public appearances, grant interviews and speak of dance as a way of communicating across cultures.

In her prime, she was fond of steam baths, horseback riding and oil painting.

An early marriage to Jordis McCoo, a postal worker, ended in divorce.

Her husband of 49 years, theater designer John Pratt, died in 1986. They adopted an orphan from Martinique, Marie-Christine Dunham-Pratt, who survives.