This next dancer led an amazing life. This is a long post, but she is one of the most influential dancers to ever grace the scene.
Katherine Mary Dunham (also known as Kaye Dunn, 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 the 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.”
While a student at the University of Chicago, Dunham took leave and went to the Caribbean to study dance and ethnography. She later returned to graduate and submitted a master’s thesis in anthropology. She did not complete the other requirements for the degree, however, and realized that her professional calling was performance.
At the height of her career 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 30 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 Ethno-choreology. She also developed the Dunham Technique.
Katherine Mary Dunham was born on June 22, 1909, in a Chicago hospital and taken as an infant to her parents’ home in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, a village about 25 miles west of Chicago. Her father, Albert Millard Dunham, was a descendant of slaves from West Africa and Madagascar. Her mother, Fanny June Dunham (née Taylor), who was of mixed French-Canadian and Native American heritage, died when Dunham was three years old. She had an older brother, Albert Jr., with whom she had a close relationship. After her father’s remarriage a few years later, the family moved to a predominantly white neighborhood in Joliet, Illinois, where her father ran a dry-cleaning business.
She graduated from Joliet Central High School in 1928, where she played baseball, tennis, basketball, track, served as vice-president of the French Club, and was on the yearbook staff. In high school, she joined the Terpsichorean Club and began to learn a kind of modern dance based on the ideas of Jaques-Dalcroze and Rudolf von Laban. At the age of 15, she organized “The Blue Moon Café”, a fundraising cabaret to raise money for Brown’s Methodist Church in Joliet, where she gave her first public performance. While still a high school student, she opened a private dance school for young black children.
After completing her studies at Joliet Junior College, Dunham moved to Chicago to join her brother Albert, who was attending the University of Chicago as a student of philosophy. She consequently decided to major in anthropology and to focus on dances of the African diaspora.
In 1935, Dunham was awarded travel fellowships from the Julius Rosenwald and Guggenheim foundations to conduct ethnographic study of the dance forms of the Caribbean, especially as manifested in the Vodun of Haiti, a path also followed by fellow anthropology student Zora Neale Hurston. She also received a grant to work with Professor Melville Herskovits of Northwestern University, whose ideas of African retention would serve as a platform for her research in the Caribbean.
Her field work in the Caribbean began in Jamaica, where she lived for several months in the remote Maroon village of Accompong, deep in the mountains of Cockpit Country. Then she traveled on to Martinique and to Trinidad and Tobago for short stays, primarily to do an investigation of Shango, the African god who remained an important presence in West Indian heritage. Early in 1936, she arrived in Haiti, where she remained for several months, the first of her many extended stays in that country through her life. While in Haiti, Dunham investigated Vodun rituals and made extensive notes in her research, particularly on the dance movements of the participants. Years later, after extensive studies and initiations, she became a mambo in the Vodun religion.
Dunham returned to Chicago in the late spring of 1936, and in August was awarded a bachelor’s degree, a Ph.B., bachelor of philosophy, with her principal area of study named as social anthropology. She was one of the first African American women to attend this college and also to earn these degrees. In 1938, using materials collected during her research tour of the Caribbean, Dunham submitted a thesis, at the University of Chicago in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a master’s degree, but she never completed her course work or took examinations to qualify for the degree. Devoted to dance performance, as well as to anthropological research, she realized that she had to choose between the two.
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 the 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.
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. Upon returning to Chicago, the company performed at the Goodman Theater and at the Abraham Lincoln Center. 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 Theatre Unit of the Federal Theatre Project.
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, was so popular that the troupe repeated it for another ten Sundays.
This success led to the entire company being engaged in the 1940 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 20 weeks in New York before moving to the West Coast for an extended run of performances there. The show created a minor controversy in the press.
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 black film musical Stormy Weather (1943).
The company returned to New York, and in September 1943, under the management of the impresario Sol Hurok, her troupe opened in Tropical Review at the Martin Beck Theater. 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, during 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.
This was the beginning of more than 20 years of performing almost exclusively outside the United States. During these years, the Dunham company appeared in some 33 countries in Europe, North Africa, South America, Australia, and East Asia. Despite these successes, the company frequently ran into periods of financial difficulties, as Dunham was required to support all of the 30 to 40 dancers and musicians.
Dunham and her company appeared in the Hollywood movie Casbah (1948) 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 38 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’s last appearance on Broadway was in 1962 in Bamboche!
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 with soprano 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. In 1967 she officially retired after presenting a final show at the famous Apollo Theater in Harlem, 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.