Through the Eyes of a Dancer: Selected Writings

Katherine Dunham: One-Woman Revolution

| 147 Katherine Dunham: One-Woman Revolution Dance Magazine, August 2000 As a teenager I had loved Katherine Dunham’s autobiography, A Touch of Innocence, for its eloquent writing before I knew anything about her as a dancer. I remembered that she grew up so poor she had to wear cardboard shoes. I never saw her dance onstage, but my mother told me what a beautiful, sensual dancer she had been—which you can easily glean from YouTube clips. For this interview, one of the Dunham technique teachers , Dana McBroom-Manno, ushered me into Dunham’s quarters at the Atria, the fancy senior facility where she lived on the Upper West Side. Because of knee problems, she’d been wheelchair-bound for years. Her sentences would sometimes ramble, but every digression held a pearl. I enjoyed playing back the audiotape to hear her low, slightly guttural voice with its Midwest twang and ring of truth. When Dunham talked with Dana and a couple of other colleagues gathered there, the glorious past of her touring company was still alive for them. They cackled over the memory of sacrificing a chicken in a Vaudun number, and they oohed and ahhed over the mention of the vibrant blues and greens that John Pratt, Dunham’s costume designer and husband, had dressed them in for another dance. Everything about “Miss Dunham” (who died in 2006) was theatrical, yet not one bit artificial. She emanated wisdom and love. All roads lead to Katherine Dunham. Well, not all. But sometimes it seems to be so. Jazz dance, “fusion,” and the search for our cultural heritage all have their antecedents in Dunham’s work as a dancer, choreographer, and anthropologist. She was the first American to present dance forms from the African diaspora on a concert stage, the first to sustain a black dance company , the first black person to choreograph for the Metropolitan Opera. She created and performed in works for stage, clubs, and Hollywood films; she developed a dance technique that is still taught today; she fought unstintingly for racial justice. She could have had her own tv show called “Dance Roots.” Dunham, ninety-one, lives in Manhattan, where she is undergoing physical therapy for her surgically replaced knees. Surrounded by former dancers, friends, and a bright-eyed two-and-a-half-year-old goddaughter, she regales them with stories, songs, and warm-hearted joking. The young Katherine Dunham studied ballet with Mark Turbyfill of the Chicago Opera and the Russian dancer Ludmilla Speranzeva. When she was only twenty-one, with Turbyfill’s help, she formed the short-lived Ballet Nègre (also called Negro Ballet). Soon after, she started the Chicago-based 148 | Through the Eyes of a Dancer Katherine Dunham Dance Company, which performed a mix of cultures including Russian folk dances, Spanish dances, and plantation dances. In 1935 and ’36, under the aegis of a Rosenwald fellowship, Dunham traveled to the Caribbean to research African-based dances. She soon choreographed pieces that reflect Haitian movements, for instance, the yanvalou, in which the spine undulates like the snake god, Damballa. But more than that, she absorbed the idea of dance as religious ritual. “In Vaudun we sacrifice to the gods,” she has said, “but the top sacrifice is dance.” Her dance Shango (1945), which depicts a possession ritual, hypnotized audiences during the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s “The Magic of Katherine Dunham ” celebration in 1987. Dunham also focused on American dance forms: “I was running around getting all these exotic things from the Caribbean and Africa when the real development lay in Harlem and black Americans,” she says. “So I developed more things in jazz.” In 1940, her revue, Le Jazz Hot included vernacular forms like the shimmy, black bottom, shorty George, and the cakewalk.That same year, Dunham collaborated with George Balanchine in choreographing the Broadway musical Cabin in the Sky. She recalls, “He took an Arab song and taught it to me for a belly dance.” About their collaboration, she confesses, “He was a help, but I was pretty adamant about what I wanted to do. We had a wonderful time together.” In 1943, the international impresario Sol Hurok presented Dunham’s company in Tropical Revue at the Martin Beck Theater on Broadway, adding Dixieland jazz musicians to boost its commercial appeal. The show became a hit, enjoying a six-week run. Dunham was a glamorous performer, and it is rumored that Hurok insured her legs for a million dollars. According...