Moving the World

Without Dunham's effort to "reveal to me the beauty of that music," Belafonte said, he would never have recorded songs like the gentle, lilting ode "Yellow Bird."

However attuned she was to musical beauty and island mysticism, Dunham could breathe fire in the studio. She was a legendary taskmaster, and even in her nineties, during that class I witnessed at Howard as part of the International Association of Blacks in Dance Conference, she was capable of whipping her students into a lather.

"Now think of your anal opening!" she cried at one point. "Does everyone know what your anal opening is? Think of a pole from the top of your head through that hole. That's your strength!"

"Don't be nervous, don't be tired and above all, don't be bored," she lectured them. "Those are the three destroyers of freedom of movement."

She called on the dancers to be "strong and easy at the same time," swaying in her wheelchair, her arms floating, responding to the drumbeat with a remarkable fluidity.

Her eyes never strayed from the dancers, who by the end of the class were trying to keep up the relentless tempo on their tiptoes, with bent knees, stamping and shimmying their shoulders, adding turns if they could. Dunham technique seeks to balance tricky polyrhythmic equations, with the head nodding out one beat and torso and legs keeping time with another.

The trick, say those who have mastered it, is to move with such musical and muscular intricacy that you achieve complete freedom. Dunham was scheduled to teach for an hour; she kept at it for two.

Not long after that class, I visited Dunham in her Manhattan apartment. She was in bed, where she spent much of her time when she wasn't making appearances. She suffered from crippling arthritis and had had both kneecaps replaced. Reclining against a mound of pillows, wearing a peacock-blue top, and fixing me with her dark, wide-set eyes, she spoke not of weakness but of strength.

"There is a need in the body to express itself," she said. "Every culture has its own form of physical expression. An unfortunate thing about today -- about Western dance -- is it's too competitive in feeling. I don't dance because I can do this movement better than you. I do it because it's what I feel , and want to do."

"When I first saw how ever-present and powerful dance was," she said, "it came as a wonderful revelation."

Pressed regarding about her views on dance, though, it became clear she was speaking less about dance and more about an area of equal concern: human rights.

"It's a real job to recognize dance at all," she continued. "Until our Western need to compete begins to slow down and becomes a need to feel and love and express motion and care for our inner selves as well as our outer selves . . . if we can find a way to live in union with other people --" She looked out the window at her view of the skyline. "We have to love ourselves, love what we are doing, and find a way to express these things in unity with other people."

Dunham banged up against politics as she sought to spread her teaching in the island she so loved.

"Long before she could teach the healthy minds, she needed the healthy bodies," Belafonte said. She found herself feeding the students, seeing to their health care and welfare, and eventually spreading this concern into a wholesale human rights activism that included a hunger strike of 47 days in 1992 to protest the U.S. policy of deporting Haitian refugees. Sadly, most of her good works there came to naught without government support to sustain them.

"She didn't perform miracles, she performed acts of human kindness," Belafonte said. "Which should be viewed as a miracle in itself."