Katherine Dunham Passes

[Valerie]

A huge loss.

Unfortunately, I am unable to post her obituary at the moment.

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

Yes, I read about it this morning. A life worth celebrating.

°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°

Katherine Dunham, 96; Created Major Black Modern Dance Company

By Anne-Marie O'Connor, Times Staff Writer
May 23, 2006
Katherine Dunham, the groundbreaking choreographer, anthropologist and social activist who founded America's first major black modern dance company, died peacefully Sunday in her sleep in New York City, friends said. She was 96.
Dunham had been in failing health for several years. The cause of death was not announced.


An indomitable cultural figure that Dance Magazine once called a "one woman revolution," Dunham brushed past barriers and social prejudices to integrate the rhythms she learned in Haiti, Brazil and Cuba into American formal dance.
During Dunham's restless, passionate life, she took turns as a published anthropologist, the toast of Broadway, a dancer in Hollywood films and a mentor to young dancers in East St. Louis, Ill., one of America's poorest communities. Dunham's compositions, often showcased in popular revues, were an inspiration to young dancers such as Alvin Ailey and Jose Limon, who would win greater acclaim than she did in the modern dance world.
"Katherine Dunham lived through an America that was deeply segregated, where race was always an issue of crisis," said actor Harry Belafonte, a friend and supporter. "For her to have made the contribution she did to culture, through her dance and her intellect, enriched America. She brought, through her art and intellectual passion and power, an insight into black life that shaped everyone's thinking of who we are."
Judith Jamison, the artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, said that Dunham "made it easier for dancers of color to realize the possibilities of being on stage; being visible; showcasing our theatricality, creativity and beauty as well as celebrating the [African] diaspora," she said in a statement. "Mr. Ailey was in total awe of her accomplishments and her contributions to make our dance lives possible."
"It's a huge loss," said Dance/USA spokeswoman Ann Norris. "Her choreography alone, and the barriers she broke, were unprecedented for her time. She was a very courageous woman."
Dunham was born in Glen Ellyn, Ill., on June 22, 1909, the daughter of an African American dry cleaner and a French Canadian mother who died when Dunham was a small child. She would grow into a young woman of unusual ambition and curiosity.
At the University of Chicago, she also became a promising anthropology student, winning the Julius Rosenwald Foundation fellowship to study anthropology in the Caribbean. But she always loved dance. At 21, she founded the Ballet Negre, her first company, in Chicago.
Her dance career would marry her two passions, drawing on her classical background studying with Russian dancer Ludmilla Speranzeva, and the Afro-Caribbean dances she discovered in her travels.
Elizabeth Chin, an associate professor of anthropology at Occidental College who studied with Dunham in 1993 in St. Louis, said Dunham taught the isolated movements of body parts that are now a staple of modern dance.
"People who were studying with her in New York in the 1940s say she invented isolationism, which is standard in jazz now," Chin said. "A lot of great dancers incorporated that. A lot of people say she is the one who started that thing. She was one of the really great African American pioneers of modern dance."
She aimed for a popular audience. She introduced New York to her shimmy in "Le Jazz Hot" in 1940. She created Georgia Brown for George Balanchine in his "Cabin in the Sky," (though she did not receive a choreography credit). She appeared in Hollywood films, such as "Carnival of Rhythm" and "Stormy Weather."
She took her popular Broadway "Tropical Revue" on an American tour that would inspire a teenage Ailey. Eventually, the renamed Katherine Dunham Dance Company would perform in more than 50 countries, until well into the 1960s.
She choreographed dozens of works that plunged modern dance into unabashed ethnicity, among them "Field Hands," "Drum Ritual," "Octoroon Ball" and "Jazz Finale."
In Dunham's heyday, "she would pack them in," said Cristyne Lawson, a former Alvin Ailey dancer, who recently stepped down as dean of the dance school at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. "She was commercially more successful than the Martha Graham company, which I was [a part of ] in those days."
Dunham often turned down invitations to perform for segregated audiences in the South, and when she found her company booked at a whites-only theater, she lectured the audiences on the evils of segregation, and told them to integrate if they wanted her company back.
During a World War II-era tour, she filed successful racial discrimination lawsuits against hotels in Chicago and Cincinnati, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Her complaints against similar conditions in Brazil, where she was enormously popular, are credited with providing the impetus for a bill against segregation there, according to "Kaiso," a new anthology about Dunham.
In 1951, she shocked audiences with "Southland," a dance about a Southern lynching that Dunham believes hurt her efforts to obtain U.S. sponsorship for her overseas travels.

For his part, Belafonte said he believed that "race played a big part" in her failure to achieve "the lofty level she deserved."
Dunham married her costume designer, John Pratt, in 1941 and they adopted an orphan, Marie-Christine, from Martinique. Pratt died in 1986.
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Some were surprised when she and Pratt moved to impoverished East St. Louis in the mid-1960s and began a cultural program to teach dance and martial arts to young people there.
"She was a legendary person who was committed to doing the hard work you have to do … in a community like East St. Louis," said poet Quincy Troupe, a St. Louis native who visited her there.
"That's important work that sometimes goes unnoticed. It's not glamorous."
Dunham made international news from East St. Louis in 1992, when she undertook a 47-day hunger strike to protest the U.S. policy of turning back Haitian refugees to their military-ruled island.
It was in the early 1990s that Belafonte visited her and found her bedridden and stricken with arthritis.
"When I discovered her economic circumstances, I was absolutely shocked," he said. "I eventually convinced her to leave."
Belafonte underwrote her medical bills and found her a home in an assisted-living facility in Manhattan with a view of the Hudson River, with the help of friends such as actors Whoopi Goldberg and Danny Glover.
In the years since then, Dunham has lived comfortably, her life punctuated by honors and accolades.
A Harvard University website says Dunham has received 48 honorary doctorates, along with such honors as induction into the French Legion of Honor and the Presidential Medal of the Arts.
Dunham was at home in bed on Sunday when a former member of her dance company, Madeline Preston, who had spent the night at the apartment, tucked the covers around her and went out midmorning.
Preston said an aide called her and told her Dunham appeared to be in distress, but by the time Preston called 911, it was too late to revive Dunham.
"She was getting ready to go, very peacefully," Preston said. "She told me about three days ago that I shouldn't go before she goes. Maybe she was trying to choreograph this."
Preston called Dunham's daughter, Marie-Christine Pratt-Dunham, so she could fly in from her home in Rome.
In East St. Louis, Dunham's supporters had been planning a birthday celebration for Dunham on June 22 and preparing her home there for her.
"We were all taken by surprise," said Dr. Lena Weathers, the president of the board of directors of the Katherine Dunham Centers for Arts and Humanities in East St. Louis. "It makes it that much more important to carry on her legacy."
*

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

[Valerie]

sdcsteve: thank you so very much!

[Ron Thorne]

What a remarkable lady. What a huge loss.

The upside is that she lived a long, productive, creative life and impacted thousands upon thousands of people in a very profound way.

[Chris D]

A true giant. RIP.

[Valerie]

Katherine Dunham pioneered melding folk dance of the African Diaspora with Hollywood glamour

By Cynthia E. Griffin
OW Staff Writer

Katherine Dunham, the Illinois-born dancer, who became the dean of black dance in America, and whose anthropologically inspired technique is still taught today, died in her sleep Sunday in New York City. She was 96.
In interviews, Wednesday, with OurWeekly, Los Angeles-based dance mavens Debbie Allen, Lula Washington and R’Wanda Lewis collectively described Dunham as a woman who changed the face of American dance and who was a champion for concerns beyond dance.
Lewis, who first saw Dunham perform as a child, who was living on home relief (welfare) on a 134th street in Harlem, still vividly recalls being transfixed by the performance, which she saw at a Broadway theater in the 1940s.
“In those days, people were doing yas sir, yas sir type dancing. (But at Miss Dunham’s show), the stage was dark, and you heard chanting. American weren’t used to anybody chanting in those days.” Lewis recalled the colorful costumes. “It was almost like a dream... the stage was alive with people. And the conga drums! We didn’t know anything thing about conga drums in those days.. It was such an experience.” Lewis still remembers the elegance of Dunham’s pointed toes as her partner and local dance teacher Vanoy Aikens, repeatedly lifted her above his head. “It was like she just floated down.”
What also struck Lewis, was the way the lighting actually complimented Dunham. “Usually we just disappeared into black.”
After that experience, Lewis laughing remembers how her momma “cheated” by scrubbing floors so she could attend dance lessons at Dunham’s Harlem School.
“I auditioned (at about age 10 or 11), and Miss Dunham, looking very dramatic, said ‘Who is this child?’ Kitty (Eartha Kitt) said ‘Oh, Miss Dunham, let her in.’
And she did. Lewis would go on to take lessons and dance in the experimental company that Dunham had developed.
To Allen, Dunham was a source of guidance. “She was my mentor. She was in many ways my muse because she inspired me to greater height of artistry and humanity and activism. Katherine Dunham is one of the greatest artists every to come out of the American culture. Her work, whether writing or humanity, has transformed hundreds of thousands of people around the world,” added Allen, said she also loved the fact that she was always teaching.
“She was a genius in ability. She was well versed in world politics, literature and religion. I remember she would give me homework—‘learn this, learn that for the next time I’d see her. Know this and that. She talked to me about a different level of humanity and the highest level; that was compassion. That was the ultimate goal, to reach—compassion.”
Washington has had a number of Dunham dancers teach at her studio including Thelma Robinson, R’ Wanda Lewis and Trina Parks and Dunham’s last male lead Aikens.
“Thelma Robinson was always talking about (Dunham’s) history, her choreography, her legacy,” added Washington, whose children’s group just recently performed a piece that was a tribute to the legendary dancer.
“Miss Dunham is why we have jazz dance today. The legendary dancers—Jack Cole, Martha Graham studied with Miss Dunham,” said Washington. “Bob Fosse’s contraction and release came from Miss Dunham. She was the first to use the technique of the pelvis, the hands, contraction. . . People don’t know the history of jazz (dance) and how it started. It started in New York with Miss Dunham.”
Dumham was born in Chicago and raised nearby, but her “traditional” two-parent family shattered when her mother, an assistant school principal, died and her father was eventually forced to sell their home and give up his business to become a traveling salesman.
While he was on the road, Dunham and her brother, Albert, lived with a number of relatives who were involved in music and vaudeville. This introduction would inspire in her a love of entertaining that would eventually propel Dunham to international fame and acclaim.
As a teen, she studied classical ballet and attended the University of Chicago on a scholarship, and it was there that she discovered the concept of dance as a form of cultural anthropology and the fact that many of the dances of that day had their roots in Africa. That would lead her to take her first of many trips to the Caribbean and Africa in 1935.
But prior to going she would establish a studio Ballet Negre, with Ruth Page and Mark Turbyfill, members of the Chicago Opera Company, and would land her first leading part in La Guiablesse in 1933.
In the Caribbean, particularly Haiti and Jamaica, Dunham would study and learn the roots of dance including some of the most sacred rituals. These she would eventually incorporate with other forms she studied into a style of choreography known today as the Dunham Technique. She would display that dance style in performances throughout the world, as well as in a number of Hollywood movies and Broadway productions.
According to a description on the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater Web site, the technique “draws from classical ballet as well as traditional African/Caribbean movement, forging a cultural link between Africa and North America. 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 an impressive range of movement.”
Ailey incorporated her techniques into his works and his dance classes after seeing Dunham’s company perform Tropical Revue at the Biltmore in Los Angeles. He is one of many who were influenced by Dunham’s work.
In addition to creating a distinctive dance style, Dunham was a political activist who fought against segregation and on behalf of civil rights. She also was a humanist, who seeing the anger and desolation in one of America’s poorest communities—predominantly African-American East St. Louis—in 1967 opened the Performing Arts Training Center, a cultural program and school for neighborhood children there. In addition to dance, the school offered drama, marital arts and humanities classes, and soon expanded its student admission to include senior citizens.
In 1977, she expanded the complex again by opening the Katherine Dunham Museum and Children’s Workshop to house her collection of artifacts from her travels and research, as well as archival material from her personal life and professional career.
Her concern about people made international headlines again, when at age 82, she began a 47-day fast in East St. Louis to protest the deportation of Haitian boat refugees fleeing to the U.S. She agreed to end her fast only after Aristide personally visited her and asked her to stop.