LEST WE FORGET:  KATHERINE DUNHAM
(June 22, 1912 - May 21, 2006)

"The matriarch and queen mother of black dance."


She had one of the most successful dance careers in America and theater of the 20th Century and directed her own dance company for many years.

During her heydey in the 1940s and 1950s, she 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 thirty 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. She was an innovator in African-American modern dance as well as a leader in the field of dance anthropology, or ethnochoreology.

Her theatrical career was can be divided into three stages: training and research (1926-1939); American and world tours (1939 - 1967); and community service beginning in 1967.  Her older brother, having experienced obstacles to growth and achievement because of race, carefully prepared the way for her to join the Little Theatre Group of Harper Avenue (Chicago). He felt the stage provided a forum for the active expression of black creativity.  Ms. Dunham taught dance at the Little Theatre, and a friend, Ruth Attaway, taught drama. Their productions drew guests like Louis Armstrong, actor Canada Lee, writers Frank Yerby, James Farrell, and Langston Hughes, painter Charles White, and one of the primary movers of the Harlem Renaissance, Alaine Locke.

Her university studies in anthropology were combined with dance and theatre education off campus.  She met Mark Turbyfill and Ruth Page of the Chicago opera who, with Ludmilla Speranzeva, became her primary teachers.  Speranzeva, a Kamerny-trained modern dancer from Russia, emphasized dance and theatre techniques.    Dunham's Ballet Negre presented Negro Rhapsody at the annual Chicago Beaux Arts Ball in 1931 and in 1934 she danced a solo in Ruth Page's La Guiablesse at the Chicago Civic Opera.     During one of her concerts with the Negro Dance Group, a member of the Rosenwald family discovered her and with encouragement from Erik Fromm and the anthropologist Robert Redfield and the Rosenwald Foundation, she spent eighteen months in the Caribbean observing and participating in the dance culture of Jamaica, Martinique, Trinidad, and Haiti .  Her master's thesis, entitled "Form and Structure in the Dance," focusing primarily on the dances of Haiti, was completed in June, 1939.   Her research trip led to doctoral studies in anthropology that became the basis for the unique Afro-American style she created.

In 1945 she opened and directed the Katherine Dunham School of Dance and Theatre near Times Square after her dance company was provided with rent-free studio space for three years by an admirer; Lee Shubert. It had an initial enrollment of 350 students.  The program included courses in dance, drama, performing arts, applied skills, humanities, cultural studies, and Caribbean research and in 1947 it was expanded and granted a charter as the Katherine Dunham School of Cultural Arts.

Her alumni included many future celebrities, such as Eartha Kitt, who, as a teenager won a scholarship to her school and later became one of her dancers before moving on to a successful singing career.  Other alumni were James Dean, Gregory Peck, Jose Ferrer, Jennifer Jones, Shelley Winters, Sidney Poitier, Shirley MacLaine, Doris Duke, and Warren Beatty.  Marlon Brando frequently dropped in to play the bongo drums and jazz musician Charles Mingus held regular jam sessions with the drummers. The Dunham Technique won international acclaim and is taught as a modern dance style in many dance schools.

Katherine Dunham's career served as a model in American modern dance and dance theatrical history.  She was given the Dancemagazine Award in 1969, the Albert Schweitzer Award in 1979, the John F. Kennedy Center Honors in 1983, and the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award in 1986.  Her devotion to inner city communities in East St. Louis, to the elderly, and to youth is one of her most valued achievements. As one of the great pioneers in restoring the black cultural heritage to American dance and to the American musical theatre, she brought African-derived dances to American audiences who had never seen them on stage.


Resources: Notable American Women in the Theatre. 1989.  Veve A. Clark
Katherine Dunham.  A Touch of Innocence: Memoirs of Childhood. 1959
Katherine Dunham. Island Possessed. 1969
Kasamance: A Fantasy, fictional work basked on her African experiences. Katherine Dunham. 1974
Ruth Biemiller. Dance: The Story of Katherine Dunham. 1969
Ruth Beckford. Katherine Dunham: A Biography. 1979
James Haskins. Katherine Dunham. 1982
Internet:  Katherine Dunham