R.I.P. Katherine Dunham

[Reza]

NY Times

May 22, 2006

Katherine Dunham, Dancer and Choreographer, Dies at 96

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 1:18 a.m. ET

NEW YORK (AP) -- Katherine Dunham, a pioneering dancer and
choreographer, author and civil rights activist who left Broadway to
teach culture in one of America's poorest cities, has died. She was 96.

Dunham died Sunday at the Manhattan assisted living facility where
she lived, said Charlotte Ottley, executive liaison for the
organization that preserves her artistic estate. The cause of death
was not immediately known.

Dunham was perhaps best known for bringing African and Caribbean
influences to the European-dominated dance world. In the late 1930s,
she established the nation's first self-supporting all-black modern
dance group.

''We weren't pushing `Black is Beautiful,' we just showed it,'' she
later wrote.

During her career, Dunham choreographed ''Aida'' for the Metropolitan
Opera and musicals such as ''Cabin in the Sky'' for Broadway. She
also appeared in several films, including ''Stormy Weather'' and
''Carnival of Rhythm.''

Her dance company toured internationally from the 1940s to the '60s,
visiting 57 nations on six continents. Her success was won in the
face of widespread discrimination, a struggle Dunham championed by
refusing to perform at segregated theaters.

For her endeavors, Dunham received 10 honorary doctorates, the
Presidential Medal of the Arts, the Albert Schweitzer Prize at the
Kennedy Center Honors, and membership in the French Legion of Honor,
as well as major honors from Brazil and Haiti.

''She is one of the very small handful of the most important people
in the dance world of the 20th century,'' said Bonnie Brooks,
chairman of the dance department at Columbia College in Chicago.
''And that's not even mentioning her work in civil rights,
anthropological research and for humanity in general.''

After 1967, Dunham lived most of each year in predominantly black
East St. Louis, Ill., where she struggled to bring the arts to a
Mississippi River city of burned-out buildings and high crime.

She set up an eclectic compound of artists from around the globe,
including Harry Belafonte. Among the free classes offered were dance,
African hair-braiding and woodcarving, conversational Creole,
Spanish, French and Swahili and more traditional subjects such as
aesthetics and social science.

Dunham also offered martial arts training in hopes of getting young,
angry males off the street. Her purpose, she said, was to steer the
residents of East St. Louis ''into something more constructive than genocide.''

Government cuts and a lack of private funding forced her to scale
back her programs in the 1980s. Despite a constant battle to pay
bills, Dunham continued to operate a children's dance workshop and a museum.

Plagued by arthritis and poverty in the latter part of her life,
Dunham made headlines in 1992 when she went on a 47-day hunger strike
to protest U.S. policy that repatriated Haitian refugees.

''It's embarrassing to be an American,'' Dunham said at the time.

Dunham's New York studio attracted illustrious students like Marlon
Brando and James Dean who came to learn the ''Dunham Technique,''
which Dunham herself explained as ''more than just dance or bodily
executions. It is about movement, forms, love, hate, death, life, all
human emotions.''

In her later years, she depended on grants and the kindness of
celebrities, artists and former students to pay for her day-to-day
expenses. Will Smith and Harry Belafonte were among those who helped
her catch up on bills, Ottley said.

''She didn't end up on the street though she was one step from it,''
Ottley said. ''She has been on the edge and survived it all with
dignity and grace.''

Dunham was married to theater designer John Thomas Pratt for 49 years
before his death in 1986.


Houston Chronicle

May 22, 2006, 8:34AM



Legendary dancer, choreographer Katherine Dunham dies
Knight Ridder Newspapers

Katherine Dunham, a legendary dancer, choreographer and social force, died Sunday in her sleep. She was 96.

Charlotte Ottley, executive liaison for Katherine Dunham Legacy Affairs, said Dunham died at an assisted living facility in New York City.

Her main caregiver, who was once her seamstress when she traveled on the road with her dance company, had just left her two hours before she died, Ottley said

"She said Miss Dunham was happy and in good spirits," Ottley said. "(Dunham) was with another caregiver when she died."

As a choreographer, Dunham created more than 90 works. Beginning in the 1940s, the Katherine Dunham Dance Company toured 57 countries, borrowing movement and rhythms from the Caribbean and South America while having a strict regimen rooted in classical ballet. Her technique, still taught, bears her name.

Dunham's intellectual, artistic and humanitarian contributions earned her many awards. Among them are the Presidential Medal of Arts, Southern Cross of Brazil, Grand Cross of Haiti, the Kennedy Center Honors, French Legion of Honor, NAACP Lifetime Achievement Award, Lincoln Academy Laureate, and the Urban League's Lifetime Achievement Award.

During an interview in 2004, she said: "My job, I think now, is to make a useful legacy. And that legacy is more than being just a dancer."

Dunham, who founded the Katherine Dunham Center for performing arts in East St. Louis, danced on Broadway, appeared in nine movies and played nightclubs constantly. She was the first black person to choreograph for the Metropolitan Opera and to win the Kennedy Center Honor in dance.

Dunham was correct in saying she was more than just a dancer. She was a social anthropologist by training, a dancer at heart, and a political activist by gut.

In 1992, Dunham risked her life and garnered international attention with a 47-day hunger strike protesting the plight of Haitian boat people. She was 82 at the time.

She first visited the nation as a University of Chicago graduate student in anthropology.

"Going to the West Indies gave me a sense of the body, and the use of the body, the so-called primitive techniques," Dunham said. "Other dancers were pretty much tied up with Martha Graham.

"I always had classical training, but it was the idea of the body as an instrument that appealed to me," Dunham said. "My real effort was to free the body from restriction."

Political activism came from circumstance, resisting the lashes of racism.

"From the beginning, I insisted that the company would not bow to segregation," she said. In Louisville, Ky., after realizing blacks were relegated to the balcony, Dunham held up the show for an hour, then finished by affixing a "Whites Only" sign to her posterior, which she turned to the audience in protest. "When Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson came weeks later, they didn't have to play to a separated audience."

Her works were inspired by story and dance, but one, Southland, was politically charged and depicted a lynching.

Her father was a black dry cleaner. Her mother was a French Canadian assistant principal 20 years his senior, already a grandmother when they wed. She died when Katherine was not yet 4 years old. Langston Hughes wrote that Dunham's 1959 childhood memoir, A Touch of Innocence, was "an absorbing family chronicle written with a gift for physical detail sometimes too real for comfort." In the book, Dunham refers to herself in the third person, a trait common among various forms of nobility.

"At times, she was strict and intimidating. She's a very complicated woman," said her friend, Julie Belafonte, wife of the singer and actor, who danced in Dunham's company. "She and her husband were awesome. It was like there was two feet of air around them that you could not penetrate."

Her legs, so famed that impresario Sol Hurok once insured them for a quarter-million dollars, were of little use in her latter years after more than a dozen knee surgeries for osteoarthritis. She did not dance in the last four decades of her life.