By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Katherine Dunham, 96, a dancer and choreographer who introduced black dance as an art form to Western audiences and once said her troupe's torso-swiveling performances were "called anthropology in New Haven, sex in Boston and in Rome -- art," died May 21 at an assisted living facility in New York.
No immediate cause of death was disclosed, but she had reportedly suffered in recent years from recurrent malaria and chronic hepatitis.
Ms. Dunham, an astounding beauty whose dances often had great erotic appeal, was among the first black artists to form a ballet troupe and achieve renown as a modern dancer and choreographer on Broadway and in Hollywood.
Her work was deeply influenced by her study of the dance of slave descendants in the Caribbean and South America. She said that visiting the West Indies on a fellowship in the late 1930s "gave me a sense of the body, and the use of the body, the so-called primitive techniques. Other dancers were pretty much tied up with Martha Graham. I always had classical training, but it was the idea of the body as an instrument that appealed to me. My real effort was to free the body from restriction."
Graham was unenthusiastic about Ms. Dunham and called her "the high priestess of the pelvic girdle."
Ms. Dunham sought to make voodoo rituals, the rumba, the "Florida Swamp Shimmy" and other American and West Indian "primitive rhythms" legitimate dance forms by presenting them on the concert stage. She made mass audiences in the 1930s and 1940s see black dance as more than tap and minstrelsy, although she said the music was not for everyone.
"In 1947, on two or three occasions, ladies had to be carried out in a dead faint," she said. "One lady was sitting near the percussion section of the orchestra -- the wrong place to put sensitive people."
Anna Kisselgoff, a New York Times dance critic, once noted that Ms. Dunham "found in West Indian ritual and dances the dignity and true essence of the black heritage that she felt had disappeared through assimilation in the United States. At the same time, she was a world pioneer in the theatricalization of these dances" and was particularly gifted at giving them a "knock-'em dead revue flavor."
Her Broadway shows included "Cabin in the Sky" (1940), which she helped choreograph with George Balanchine, "Tropical Revue" (1943), "Carib Song" (1945) and "Bal Negre" (1946).
Ms. Dunham was one of the first black choreographers to work for the Metropolitan Opera, where in 1963 she directed dances for Giuseppe Verdi's "Aida." They borrowed heavily from her training as a Haitian voodoo priestess, of which she joked she held the equivalent of a "mambo black belt."
She traveled constantly in the 1950s on world tours featuring dance pieces that were physically alluring and contained fierce social criticism. One piece, "Southland" (1951), was about lynchings in the South and included a black man swinging from a rope while a woman sang the anti-lynching song "Strange Fruit."
To Ms. Dunham, dance was about communal rituals and links and was inseparable from social justice. In 1944, while touring with "Tropical Review" in Louisville, she chided the audience for enjoying the show in a segregated theater. Another story had her using a more piquant way of expressing her rage -- placing a "Whites Only" sign on her buttocks and giving the audience the view she felt they deserved.
"When Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson came weeks later, they didn't have to play to a separated audience," she later told a reporter.
For decades, a home she kept in Haiti doubled as a medical clinic and music hall. When she was 82, she went on a 47-day hunger strike to protest a U.S. government decision to send back Haitians on boats fleeing starvation and repression. Only the intervention of then-deposed Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide persuaded her to end her fast.
Katherine Mary Dunham was born in Chicago on June 22, 1909, and raised in nearby Glen Ellyn, Ill. Her father was a tailor, her mother a school administrator of French-Canadian and American Indian lineage. After her mother's death in 1913, her father bought a dry cleaning business, remarried and moved to Joliet, Ill.
Ms. Dunham published a short story in a magazine edited by W.E.B. DuBois at age 12 and was class poet in high school. She later wrote a memoir, "A Touch of Innocence," and several volumes of published anthropology, including "Journey to Accompong" and "Island Possessed."
As a child, she put on a fundraising "cabaret" for a church and wanted to dance in school. "I wanted to be a fairy in a pink tutu up on my toes, but I was always a brownie in the woods," she once said, blaming racial stereotyping.
In 1928, Ms. Dunham moved to Chicago to study ballet with Ludmilla Speranzeva, one of the few teachers who welcomed black dancers. Through Speranzeva, she was introduced to Latin, Balinese and East Indian dance and made crucial connections with dancers Mark Turbyfill and Ruth Page.
Her Ballet Nègre, a black ballet group formed with the white Turbyfill, had an unpleasant start when landlords refused to lend rehearsal space for their venture. Their enterprise was short-lived, although it did result in a performance of their "Negro Rhapsody" at the Chicago Beaux Arts Ball in 1931.
About that time, she formed the Negro Dance Group with Speranzeva's backing; appeared in Page's ballet "La Guiablesse" ("The Devil Woman"), based on a West Indian legend; and danced at the 1934 Chicago World's Fair with a revived Ballet Nègre.
Meanwhile, Ms. Dunham enrolled at the University of Chicago and was influenced by her studies with anthropologist Robert Redfield. In 1935, the year before her graduation, she won a Julius Rosenwald Fund grant to study Caribbean dance, ritual and folklore. In Haiti, she performed a dance routine featuring Spanish castanets, the music by Debussy and a "Fire Dance" that concluded with the release of doves.
In 1938, she choreographed her first full-length ballet, "L'Ag'Ya" -- a story of lust and revenge that ends with a Martinique fighting dance. She also created a raunchy contemporary duet called "Barrelhouse" and a Brazilian piece, "Bahiana," showing a woman who becomes increasingly entangled in the ropes of dockside weavers.
An early career highlight was "Cabin in the Sky," in which she was Ethel Waters's wicked rival for Dooley Wilson and sang such suggestive songs as "Honey in the Honeycomb." She was replaced by Lena Horne in the film version. Ms. Dunham was also a minor player -- dancing a tropical number in a dream sequence -- in "Stormy Weather" (1943), in which Horne starred.
Over the years, Ms. Dunham was dance director on the Abbott and Costello comedy "Pardon My Sarong" (1942), as well as "Casbah" (1948), "Mambo" (1954), the Amazon-set "Green Mansions" (1959) and John Huston's "The Bible" (1966). In the latter, she conceived and choreographed the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.
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.