Katherine Dunahm, Dancer/Choreographer
Katherine Dunham, 96, dancer/choreographer, who led a long, productive life on and off stage, died in New York City. It was confirmed by a friend and former Duncan dancer, Glory Van Scott. Duncan also had had homes in East St. Louis, where she ran inner-city cultural programs and in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti. Born in 1909 in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, her father was a descendant of slaves from Madagascar and West Africa; her French Canadian mother died when Miss Dunham was young. Her remarried father took her to Joliet, Illinois, where Dunham, at 15, shocked neighbors by staging a "cabaret" to raise funds for the Methodist Church, hardly knowing what "cabaret" meant. Later, she attended Joliet Junior College and the University of Chicago, where she gained a B.A. and a doctorate in anthropology.
Her dance education had begun with Ludmilla Speranzeva and Mark Turbyfil with whom she established a short-lived Ballet Negre in 1930. Chicago choreographer Ruth Page, cast her in a ballet based on Martinique folklore and from there her career took off. She founded a series of companies that eventually became the Katherine Dunham Dance Company. She did her anthropological field work in the Caribbean after receiving a grant to study traditional dances in Jamaica, Martinique, Trinidad and Haiti. Her company, in 1937 attracted little attention in New York until she choreographed "Pins and Needles," a satirical revue sponsored by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. Somehow, Dunham always managed to combine her philanthropic, political, social and humanitarian activities with her performances. Beautiful and seductive, Dunham danced to fame in Balanchine's choreography for "Cabin in the Sky" (1940), "Carib Song" (1945), "Bal Negre" (1946), "Caribbean Rhapsody" (1948) and "Bamboche" (1962) as well as in many other productions. In 1934, she choreographed the Met's "Aida." Her appearances in films enlarged her fame.
Audiences perceived her work as exotic, lush and vivid. But in the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater's production of "Magic of Katherine Dunham" (1987) Dunham evoked ordinary lives that were lived with ordinary dignity. Ailey's encounter with her, when he was a teen-ager in 1943, intrigued him with the color, heat and light of her lush production of "Tropical Revue." The younger dancers, when they rehearsed Ailey's presentation of "Magic" did not appreciate her perfectionism and her technique, a blend of Afro-Caribbean, ballet and modern dance.
Dunham received the Presidential Medal of the Arts, the Albert Schweitzer Prize, Kennedy Center Honors and honors from the French and Haitian governments. She continued throughout her life to be active and outspoken, but able to calm the angriest with her soft spoken, outrage at injustices.
As an author under the pseudonym Kaye Dunn, her five books included her last, Dances of Haiti in 1984. Dunham was married to John Pratt, an artist and designer from 1941 until his death in 1986. Her surviving daughter, Marie Christine Dunham Pratt, lives in Rome. Dunham's influence was inestimable in raising the barrier for black dancers.