Sunday, August 18, 2013
KATHERINE DUNHAM (June 22, 1909 – May 21,
2006) was an American dancer, choreographer, author, educator, and
social activist. Dunham had one of the most successful dance careers in
American and European theater of the 20th century, and directed her own dance
company for many years. She has been called the "matriarch and queen
mother of black dance".
During
her heyday in the 1940s and 1950s, Dunham was renowned throughout Europe and
Latin America and was widely popular in the United States, where the Washington
Post called her "dancer Katherine the Great". For almost
thirty years she maintained the Katherine Dunham Dance Company, the only
self-supported American black dance troupe at that time, and over her long
career she choreographed more than ninety individual dances. Dunham
was an innovator in African-American modern dance as well as a leader
in the field of dance anthropology, or ethnochoreology.
In 1928, while still an undergraduate, Dunham began to study
ballet with Ludmilla Speranzeva, a Russian dancer who had settled in Chicago,
having come to the United States with the Franco-Russian vaudeville troupe Le
Théâtre de la Chauve-Souris directed by impresario Nikita Balieff. She also
studied ballet with Mark Turbyfill and Ruth Page, who became prima
ballerina of the Chicago Opera. Through her ballet teachers, she was also
exposed to Spanish, East Indian, Javanese, and Balinese dance forms. In 1931,
when she was only 21, Dunham formed a group called Ballets Nègres, one of the
first black ballet companies in the United States. After a single,
well-received performance in 1931, the group was disbanded. Encouraged by
Speranzeva to focus on modern dance instead of ballet, Dunham opened her first
real dance school in 1933 called the Negro Dance Group. It was a venue for
Dunham to teach young black dancers about their African heritage.
In 1934–36 Dunham performed as a guest artist with the ballet
company of the Chicago Opera. Ruth Page had written a scenario and
choreographed La Guiablesse ("The Devil Woman"),
based on a Martinican folk tale in Lafcadio Hearn's Two Years in
the French West Indies. It opened in Chicago in 1933, with a black cast and
with Page dancing the title role. The next year it was repeated with Katherine
Dunham in the lead and with students from Dunham's Negro Dance Group in the
ensemble. Her dance career was then interrupted by her anthropological research
in the Caribbean.
Having completed her undergraduate work at the University of
Chicago and having made the decision to pursue a career as a dancer and
choreographer rather than as an academic, Dunham revived her dance ensemble and
in 1937 journeyed with them to New York to take part in "A Negro Dance
Evening" organized by Edna Guy at the 92nd Street YMHA. The troupe
performed a suite of West Indian dances in the first half of the program and a
ballet entitled Tropic Death, with Talley Beatty, in the second
half. Upon returning to Chicago, the company performed at the Goodman Theater
and at the Abraham Lincoln Center. Dunham's well-known works Rara Tonga and Woman
with a Cigar were created at this time. With choreography characterized
by exotic sexuality, both became signature works in the Dunham repertory. After
successful performances of her company, Dunham was named dance director of the
Chicago Negro Theater Unit of the Federal Theater Project. In this post, she
choreographed the Chicago production of Run Li'l Chil'lun,
performed at the Goodman Theater, and produced several other works of
choreography including The Emperor Jones and Barrelhouse.
At this time Dunham first became associated with designer John
Pratt, whom she later married. Together, they produced the first version of her
dance composition L'Ag'Ya, which premiered on January 27, 1938, as
a part of the Federal Theater Project in Chicago. Based on her research in
Martinique, this three-part performance integrated elements of a Martinique
fighting dance into American ballet to achieve a remarkable degree of
syncretism. This blending of cultures also appeared in the way that Dunham
skillfully and stylistically employed choreographic techniques to evoke images
of Afro-Caribbean customs and art.
In 1939, Dunham's company gave further performances in Chicago and
Cincinnati and then went back to New York, where Dunham had been invited to
stage a new number for the popular, long-running musical revue Pins and
Needles 1940, produced by the International Ladies' Garment Workers
Union. As this show continued its run at the Windsor Theater, Dunham booked her
own company in the theater for a Sunday performance. This concert, billed
as Tropics and Le Hot Jazz, included not only her
favorite partners Archie Savage and Talley Beatty but her principal Haitian
drummer, Papa Augustin. Initially scheduled for a single performance, the show
was so popular that the troupe repeated it for another ten Sundays.
This success led to the entire company being engaged in the
Broadway production Cabin in the Sky, staged by George
Balanchine and starring Ethel Waters. With Dunham in the sultry role
of temptress Georgia Brown, the show ran for twenty weeks in New York before
moving to the West Coast for an extended run of performances there. Most
critics called it a draw.
After the national tour of Cabin in the Sky, the
Dunham company stayed in Los Angeles, where they appeared in the Warner
Brothers short film Carnival of Rhythm (1941). The next year
Dunham appeared in the Paramount musical film Star Spangled Rhythm (1942)
in a specialty number, "Sharp as a Tack," with Eddie
"Rochester" Anderson. Other movies she appeared in during this period
included the Abbott and Costello comedy Pardon My Sarong (1942)
and the famous break-through black musical Stormy Weather (1943).
Later that year, they returned to New York, and in September 1943,
under the management of the renowned impresario Sol Hurok, her troupe
opened in Tropical Review at the Martin Beck Theater.
Featuring lively Latin American and Caribbean dances, plantation dances, and
American social dances, the show was an immediate success. The original
two-week engagement was extended by popular demand into a three-month run,
after which the company embarked on an extensive tour of the United States and
Canada. In Boston, the bastion of conservatism, the show was banned in 1944
after only one performance. Although it was well received by the audience,
local censors feared that the revealing costumes and provocative dances might
compromise public morals. After the tour, in 1945, the Dunham company appeared
in the short-lived Blue Holiday at the Belasco Theater in New
York and in the more successful Carib Song at the Adelphi
Theatre. The finale to the first act of this show was Shango, a
staged interpretation of a Vodun ritual that would become a permanent part of
the company's repertory.
In 1946 Dunham returned to Broadway for a revue entitled Bal
Nègre, which received glowing notices from theater and dance critics. Early
in 1947 Dunham choreographed the musical play Windy City, which
premiered at the Great Northern Theater in Chicago, and later in the year she
opened a cabaret show in Las Vegas, marking the first year that the city became
a popular entertainment destination. Later that year she went with her troupe
to Mexico, where their performances were so popular that they remained for more
than two months. After Mexico, Dunham began touring in Europe, where she was an
immediate sensation. In 1948 she opened A Caribbean Rhapsody first
at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London, then swept on to the Théâtre des
Champs-Élysées in Paris, where the company took the city by storm. She and her
dancers were treated as members of the jet set, mixing with nobility and
celebrities such as famous French actor Maurice Chevalier.
This was the beginning of more than twenty years of performing
almost exclusively outside America. During these years, the Dunham company
appeared in some thirty-three countries in Europe, North Africa, South America,
Australia, and East Asia. Dunham continued to develop dozens of new productions
during this period, and the company met with enthusiastic audiences wherever
they went. Despite these successes, the company frequently ran into periods of
financial difficulties, as Dunham was required to support all of the thirty to
forty dancers and musicians.
In 1948, Dunham and her company appeared in the Hollywood
movie Casbah, with Tony Martin, Yvonne de Carlo, and Peter
Lorre, and in the Italian film Botta e Risposta, produced by Dino
de Laurentiis. Also that year they appeared in the first ever hour-long
American spectacular televised by NBC when television was first
beginning to spread across America. This was followed by television
spectaculars filmed in London, Buenos Aires, Toronto, Sydney, and Mexico City.
In 1950, Sol Hurok presented Katherine Dunham and Her Company in a
dance revue at the Broadway Theater in New York, with a program composed of
some of Dunham's best works. It closed after only thirty-eight performances,
and the company soon thereafter embarked on a tour of venues in South America,
Europe, and North Africa. They had particular success in Denmark and France. In
the mid-1950s, Dunham and her company appeared in three films: Mambo (1954),
made in Italy; Die Grosse Starparade(1954), made in Germany;
and Música en la Noche (1955), made in Mexico City.
The Dunham company's international tours ended in Vienna in 1960,
when it was stranded without money because of bad management by their
impresario. Dunham saved the day by arranging for the company to appear in a
German television special, Karaibishe Rhythmen, after which they
returned to America. Dunham's last appearance on Broadway was in 1962 in Bamboche!,
which included a few former Dunham dancers in the cast and a contingent of
dancers and dummers from the Royal Troupe of Morocco. It was not a success,
closing after only eight performances.
A highlight of Dunham's later career was the invitation from New
York's Metropolitan Opera to stage dances for a new production
of Aida starring Leontyne Price. Thus, in 1963, she became the
first African-American to choreograph for the Met since Hemsley Winfield set
the dances for The Emperor Jones in 1933. The critics
acknowledged the historical research she did on dance in ancient Egypt but did
not particularly care for the results they saw on the Met
stage. Subsequently, Dunham undertook various choreographic commissions at
several venues in the United States and in Europe. In 1967 she officially
retired after presenting a final show at the famous Apollo Theater inHarlem,
New York. Even in retirement Dunham continued to choreograph: one of her major
works was directing Scott Joplin's opera Treemonisha in
1972 at Morehouse College in Atlanta.
In 1978 Dunham was featured in the PBS special, Divine
Drumbeats: Katherine Dunham and Her People, narrated by James Earl
Jones, as part of the Dance in Americaseries. Alvin Ailey later
produced a tribute for her in 1987-8 with his American Dance Theater at
Carnegie Hall entitled The Magic of Katherine Dunham.
.jpg)
.jpg)
