Dunham, Katherine 1909-2006
(Katherine Mary Dunham)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born June 22, 1909, in Glen Ellyn, IL; died May 21, 2006, in New York, NY. Choreographer, dancer, educator, activist, and author. Dunham was best known as a groundbreaking choreographer who integrated styles from the Caribbean and Brazil into modern American dance. Dunham was born to a humble home; her father was a dry cleaner and her mother passed away when she was still a child. Dunham, however, was blessed with a curious mind. She attended Joliet Junior College, and decided to study anthropology at the University of Chicago. On a fellowship, she traveled to the Caribbean. Already interested in dance, Dunham was fascinated by the style of dance she saw while in the Caribbean, which would influence the course of her future. After graduating, instead of pursuing anthropology, she followed her love of dance, both of the classical style inspired by European ballet and the Afro-Caribbean influence that added so much passion and unique movements. She returned to Chicago and taught dance and theater, also traveling to such locations as New York City, Paris, Stockholm, and Haiti. Dunham worked as a professional dancer in the 1930s, appearing in films such as Carnival of Rhythm and on stage in 1940's Le Jazz Hot; although uncredited for her work, she created the unique role of Georgia Brown in the George Balanchine production of Cabin in the Sky (1940). A member of the Chicago Opera Company from 1935 to 1936, she was supervisor of the Chicago City Theater Project on cultural studies in 1939, and dance director of the Labor Stage from 1939 to 1940. Meeting with considerable racial prejudice, Dunham decided to found her own black dance company, the Negro Dance Group, in 1934, along with the Chicago Negro School of Ballet, with the help of famed dancer Ludmilla Speranzeva. The group was renamed the Katherine Dunham Dance Company a few years later. Dunham taught the dancers and did their choreography, and she is credited with employing a unique style of dance in which isolated body movements are used. Her choreography has since become a standard style used in jazz dance, and it is credited by most dance experts with paving the way for other prominent black artists such as Alvin Ailey and Talley Beatty, who helped solidify acceptance of modern, African-American and Caribbean-inspired dance. During the 1940s, Dunham's company became extremely popular with audiences, especially for her touring show Tropical Revue (1943); they also performed in movies, including Pardon My Sarong (1942), Mambo (1954), and The Bible (1966). Dunham was the choreographer—often uncredited because she was black—of many other jazz and modern-dance style stage shows, such as Jazz Finale, Caribbean Rhapsody, Bal Negre, and Drum Ritual. Always conscious of the state of racial prejudice in America during the 1940s and later years, Dunham refused to allow her company to perform at all-white venues and would often lecture around the country on the evils of segregation. She went so far as to sue hotels in Cincinnati and Chicago for their racial policies, and won her cases. Dunham's stance sometimes led to controversy, such as when she produced the show Southland, a 1951 stage production that was about a lynching. Audiences were deeply disturbed by it, and some in the field have since held that it was Southland that kept Dunham from gaining U.S. sponsorship to take her shows overseas. Despite this setback, she managed to take her dance company to over fifty countries around the world. Continuing with her company into the 1960s and into the early 1970s, her last major work as choreographer was Treemonisha, a 1972 Scott Joplin opera. Financial problems led to the closing of her school in 1967, but Dunham founded a dance school in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1961. After her Chicago school closed, she taught at Southern Illinois University in St. Louis. Moved by the poverty she saw in the city, she concentrated on teaching disadvantaged children, including gang members, and got into trouble with the police briefly for defending a black youth who had been arrested. By the late 1970s, Dunham was winning richly deserved honors for her contributions to dance, including the 1979 Albert Schweitzer Award for humanitarian achievement, a Kennedy Center Honor in 1983, the National Medal of Arts in 1989, and numerous honorary doctorate degrees. After her husband passed away in 1986, Dunham lived in humble style in East St. Louis. She continued her activism, making the newspapers in 1992 when she held a hunger strike to protest U.S. treatment of Haitian refugees. Around that time, actor Harry Belafonte discovered that she was living in poor conditions and was suffering from arthritis that left her bed-ridden. Enlisting support from actors Danny Glover and Whoopi Goldberg, they paid for her to move to an assisted living community in Manhattan, where she spent her final days. Dunham was the author of an autobiography, A Touch of Innocence (1959; reprinted, 1994), as well as books on dance, such as Dances of Haiti (1983), the cowritten play Ode to Taylor Jones (1967), and several television scripts.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

BOOKS

Dunham, Katherine Mary, A Touch of Innocence: Memoirs of Childhood, University of Chicago Press, 1994.

PERIODICALS

Los Angeles Times, May 23, 2006, p. B10.

New York Times, May 23, 2006, pp. B7, E1.

Times (London, England), May 29, 2006, p. 42.

Washington Post, May 23, 2006, p. B6.