Katherine Dunham - Black History Month in Dance, 2021 - 7

Black History in DanceDance HistoryChoreographersGeorge Balanchine Essays on DanceWomen’s History in DancePerformers

Feb 11

39; 40; 41; 42; 43. In dance, Black History Month should not get far without honouring Katherine Dunham (1909- 2006) - and yet who today has a good sense of her great and international achievement? Dunham was not just a dancer, choreographer, and director of her own company; she was also an anthropologist, a writer, an investigator and amalgamator of diverse dance styles (ballet, modern, Haitian not least). Today, so much of her work has been absorbed in that of others that it’s hard to discern how vital a role it played for many years.

Her life and career began in Chicago, a city whose importance to American dance history is still insufficiently appreciated elsewhere her father was black, her mother part Native American, part French Canadian. She founded Ballet Nègre in 1930 in Chicago; she opened her first dance school there in 1933, the Negro Dance Group. In 1934 - year of “Four Saints in Three Acts” with its all African American cast playing on Broadway, and George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet first performances (in “Mozartiana” and Serenade”) - Dunham led an all-African American cast in Ruth Page’s “La Guaiablesse (The Devil Woman)”, based on a legend from Martinique, for Chicago Opera. She began to show her work in New York in 1937; by 1939, she was choreographing material for Hollywood (“Carnival of Rhythm”) and Broadway (“Pins and Needles”).

In 1940, she collaborated with George Balanchine on the musical “Cabin in the Sky”, with an all-African American cast: she and her colleagues then toured the nation in that in 1941. In 1943, presented by Sol Hurok, her Broadway show “Tropical Revue” is extended from its initially planned fortnight run to one of three months. (It’s worth reading Edwin Denby’s account of this, in his “Dance Writings”.) The show toured the nation: in Louisville, Kentucky, Dunham spoke to the all-white audience against segregation: “"It makes me very happy to know that you have liked us . . . but tonight our hearts are very sad because this is a farewell to Louisville. . . . I have discovered that your management will not allow people like you to sit next to people like us. I hope that time and the unhappiness of this war for tolerance and democracy . . . will change some of these things. Perhaps then we can return."

By 1943, Dunham was both a missionary for black dance and an accumulating success story. In the nineteen years that followed (1944-1962), her school gathered strength; she continued to publish her own writings; and she and her company became increasingly established on Broadway, in Hollywood, in national tours. They also began to tour Latin America, Europe, North Africa, Australia and New Zealand, and East Asia.

She remained active for almost all the rest of her life, but 1937-1962 were the main years of her glory. Some of her work fed the most popular achievements of both the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and Dance Theatre of Harlem. But she herself remarked that her greatest contribution to American dance may have been in freeing the pelvic girdle, in making the pelvis a more active part of dance movement. Since the Balanchine style in ballet often seems to European eyes to make far greater use of the pelvis, it’s worth considering that Balanchine either took this from Dunham or at least took further encouragement from Dunham’s example in pursuing this vital development in style. Dunham herself had taken it from African and Caribbean dance; today it has become an element in international dance.

Monday 8 February