via the LOC. Dunham at the age of 16, according to Joanna Dee Das’s biography of Dunham.
Katherine Dunham’s parents broke the color barrier when they moved to the posh Chicago suburb of Glen Ellyn. Her mother, Fanny, was a well-educated school principal who was light enough to pass for white. Her husband, Albert, was a decade younger than her and much darker. When they bought land to build a house, people assumed Fanny was a widow and Albert her servant. When they found out the truth, someone lobbed a bomb through the window of their house. Undeterred, Albert got his shotgun and sat watch outside his property until the home was complete. No one bothered them again [Dee Das loc 493].
Dunham never got to know her mother well. Fanny passed away of stomach cancer when Dunham was three years old. Her father remarried and became abusive. She and her brother Albert Jr. moved between Glen Ellyn, Joliet, and the South Side of Chicago as they grew up. It was not easy being shuffled between different members of her extended family. In addition to the normal difficulties of such dislocations, Dunham also experienced radical shifts of class as she moved from middle class homes to families where she knew extreme want and deprivation. Katherine developed an interest in theater, dance, and world cultures. For instance, she scandalized some members of her church when she performed an “Oriental” dance at a cabaret which she organized as a fundraiser. At the same time, she learned emotional detachment and aimed for intellectual sophistication. This mix of passion and disengagement would become a central feature of her personality.
Katherine’s brother Albert was admitted to the University of Chicago, and a year later in 1928 she joined. Chicago was a rare example of a university which had no racial or gender restrictions. It’s new president Robert Hutchins had just pushed through an ambitious reform of the college:it admitted freshman at the age of sixteen, who skipped their last two years of high school. Courses were optional: the college would grant a degree to any students who could complete a series of grueling six hour long examinations. It was an atmosphere that bred self-reliance, rigor, and independence. Most students attended the classes which prepared them for examination, but others — such as Dunham — could do as they wanted.
And there was a lot for Dunham to do. Like Harlem, Chicago was in the throes of a black renaissance in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Dunham became active at The Cube Theatre, an experimental and interracial space and in 1930 created the Ballet Nègre, a black dance company who performed ballet, which had only became a fine art in the United States. Influenced by Isadora Duncan, Ruth Page, as well as her teacher and partner Ludmila Speranzeva, Dunham opened a dance school that mixed ballet, modern art, and ‘primitive rhythms’. She also began developing choreography that combined these different currents of dance.
via the NYT. Katherine Dunham in L’Ag’ya in 1938 according to Joanna Dee Das’s biography of Dunham.
Dunham’s interest in non-Western cultures led her to anthropology. She began working closely with Robert Redfield, at the University of Chicago, and Melville Herskovits at Northwestern. Herskovits was a Boas student with a focus on Africa. He was interested in ‘acculturation’, a popular theoretical current of the 1930s which examined how cultures gained and lost new traits. His best known work argued that African Americans retained African cultural traits and did not have their customs and traditions completely obliterated by slavery. When Dunham expressed an interest in the connections between African American and other forms of dance, he suggested that she apply for fa Rosenwald fund grant.
Although little-known today, the Rosenwald fund had a huge impact in anthropology. Julius Rosenwald was a nice Jewish boy from Springfield, Illinois who rose to become the head of Sears and Roebuck, which was then stationed in Chicago. After he had made his millions, he created the Rosenwald Fund to give it away. It was an unusual philanthropy. Unliked Carnegie or Rockefeller, Rosenwald did not want to be remembered or memorialized. The only reason there is a ‘Rosenwald Hall’ at the University of Chicago is that the building was completed when he was on vacation, and when he came back to find his name on it he was too bashful to ask that it be sandblasted off [see Diner for details]. Rosenwald also wanted his to have a real and immediate impact, so unlike Rockefeller and others, he insisted that all of it be spent in the years after his death. He was particularly attracted to the cause of black education, and his fund built almost 5,000 elementary schools - 4,977 to be precise — for blacks in the south [Diner loc 2297]. More than two thirds of southern blacks went to these schools.
The fund also supported artists and academics, and Dunham was both. Her original grant application to the foundation requested money for her to study ballet and then travel to Egypt and Ethiopia and immerse herself in ancient civilizations. When the committee interviewed her and asked for clarification, she said “it would be easier if I just showed you”, took off her shoes, and began dancing. They funded her, but for a much smaller and more Herskovitian project: She would visit the Caribbean and study African elements in Jamaica, Haiti, and the Bahamas. From June 1935 to April 1936 Dunham did her fieldwork in the Caribbean and fell in love with Haiti in particular. She was initiated into voodoo in a lave tete ceremony and rubbed elbows with some of the country’s most impressive thinkers and politicians. Haiti became central to her life, both because of its rich and powerful dance traditions and because it enabled her to see black people as a diaspora community whose connection was stronger than the ties of nationality.
On her return to the United States, Dunham found she could no longer balance the life of an academic with the life of a dancer. She graduated with a Ph.B. (an bachelor degree) from Chicago in August 1936. abandoned her plan to pursue an MA, and became a full-time dancer. She slowly developed what became known as Dunham Technique: a mix of ballet, modern, and Afro-Caribbean elements which was distinctly her own. She was opposed to the then-prevalent view that black people had an intuitive knowledge of primitive dance but were untrainable in sophisticated white fine art traditions of dance. She believed, rather, that primitive dance was a cross-cultural phenomenon found in primitive societies all over the world, and that it needed to be taught just as ballet was taught — none of her American students naturally took to Haitian dance just because they were black, after all. For instance, she choreographed a ‘Melanesian’ style dance called Rarotonga, despite the fact that Rarotonga is in the Cook Islands, far from Melanesia. She choreographed hula without having studied with a kumu. She was opposed to the gratuitous sexualization of black women’s bodies for the white male gaze, but felt sexuality was a powerful and primal force in human life which was deeply connected to the religious and spiritual sides of human nature — she was, after all, married to Damballah. And she certainly had no problem flaunting her sexuality on stage as well as using off-stage. When she created choreography which was abstract, modern, and also distinctly black, white elite audiences turned away. When she incorporated ethnographic and erotic elements, they called it entertainment and not art. In the 1940s when Pearl Primus and others are explicitly creating political art, Dunham’s work was seen as insufficiently dedicated to racial uplift. In the 1950s, when nations in Africa became independent, nationalists seeking to protect and promote their cultural heritage wondered why an American was performing ‘African’ dance.
via the Dee Das biography
Dunham spent the late 1930s in Chicago and on Broadway, taking larger and larger roles dancing and choreographing numbers. She established a style of revue in which different dances from different parts of the world would be performed, often with a simple romantic narrative. She began incorporating dance forms from the American south, on at least one occasion performing in black face, despite her lack of familiarity with that region of the country. Dunham became a Broadway star — she had at last arrived. During the 1940s she made the leap to movies, moving to Hollywood and starring in several adaptations of her Broadway numbers. She aimed to use dance to introduce people to other cultures, but succeeded in becoming a favorite pin-up girl for black GIs fighting in World War II. She also married her set designer, a white man named James Pratt. An interracial marriage was tremendously difficult in the 1940s, not the least because the black literati expected Dunham to marry inside the community. She and Pratt would have a long and loving marriage, despite the fact that they would spend extended periods away from each other, and that Dunham slept with many people who were not Pratt, even settling down with one of them for several years. Unable to bear children, she eventually adopted a daughter who was raised by Pratt, Dunham, and the extended family of Dunham’s dance company and close acquaintances.
Dunham in Le Jazz Hot in 1939 via the US Library of Congress.
The cultural and sexual politics of Dunham’s work and its reception by different audiences was complex. This image from the Dunham archive at Southern Illinois University dates from 1 November 1952 carried the caption “ “THE LEGS THAT PUT A KICK INTO ANTHROPOLOGY - She’s here again, her legs as long and lithe as ever. And scholarly old gentlemen are polishing up their pince-nez and hoping for another lecture. Katherine Dunham, the girl with a kick like a million volts - here she is doing the Cakewalk - is paying her second visit to the West End, leading an American troupe of dancers. But Katherine, besides being a dancer, is a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Philosophy. She was invited to talk about Negro cults to the Royal Anthropological Society."
Dunham grew disgusted with Hollywood, lamenting the fact that she would never be cast as anything other than a maid [Dee Das]. She moved to New York in 1944 and opened the Katherine Dunham School of Dance. The school was a marvel. It was co-organized by Franz Boas’s daughter Franziska, who was also interested in exploring anthropology and dance. The school was integrated and offered lessons in dance as well as classes in anthropology and other subjects. It represented Dunham’s vision of a holistic education which included the whole body and cultivated cultured individuals. It was also incredibly popular, attracting anthropologists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, then just a down-on-his luck refugee from World War II — he attended the lectures, not the dance lessons! In addition to a number of dancers who would go on to be important (such as singer Eartha Kitt, who played Bat Woman in the first Batman TV show), she attracted movie stars such as James Dean and Marlon Brando. Mongo Santamaria and other musicians were involved with her in this period. The school would close in 1955 as Dunham focused on her dancing company.
The school ultimately closed. Like many of Dunham’s other projects it suffered from a mix of grand ambition and neglect. Dunham’s vision was always impracticably large, and she was perpetually working on several projects at once. What’s more, she was not an able administrator. She was a micromanager who wanted to be involved in every decision that was made, but rarely had time to make these decisions. She delegated jobs to people who she trusted, even if they were not especially competent. She was not good with money. Running a school of dance or a dance company is almost impossible to manage financially, and Dunham tried to do both simultaneously. Even worse, her penurious childhood had left her with expensive tastes and a love for a lavish, glamorous, and expensive lifestyle. It also left her with a heart of gold, and she loved to offer students scholarships and tuition reductions to her school. As a result, most of Dunham’s projects failed, and she herself lived on a financial tightrope, living a glamorous, jet-setting life while always a few months away from poverty. In 1950, for example, she had a romantic affair with the Pakistani prince Ali Khan, who gave her a diamond necklace. She pawned it to pay her dance company’s bills [dee das p. 102].
In 1947 Katherine Dunham took her dance company on a world tour. It would last fourteen years, until 1961. World War II was over, the Cold War had begun, and Dunham’s company made her an international superstar. She was know note world over as a celebrity, and intellectual, and a member of the new global high society. America was now a world superpower, and the State Department was eager to promote Dunham as cultural ambassador. Her status as a black woman performing American cultural dances with diaspora connections made her an ideal foil for Communist claims that America was a racist country. Dunham paid a price for the support. For instance, her dance number Southland was groundbreaking in its portrayal of a lynching, but was shelved after a frosty reception from the US government. While Dunham felt revolutionary politics and propagandistic art were beneath her, the FBI had opened a filed on her during her time in Hollywood. She may have travelled abroad in part to avoid MacCarthyism. No doubt this had a chilling effect on her political involvement as well.
Dunham at Habitation Leclerc ca 1958 from the SIU archives. There is YouTube video (unattributed) which features an interview with her in French from around this period.
Dunham disbanded her company in 1960. They had run out of money and she was tired of being rootless and unsettled. In 1951 she had purchased an estate in Haiti, Habitation Leclerc, and had tried running it as a medical clinic, cultural center, and residence during her time on tour. She now met Dick Frisell, a twenty four year old trust funder from Sweden. They become lovers and she, decades older than him, convinced him to settle down in Haiti with her and use his fortune to renovate the property. They called themselves husband and wife and, remarkably, lived together with Pratt, her husband, and her daughter Marie-Christine. Leclerc was formerly a mansion where French colonizers lived and tortured slaves. Dunham was made a citizen of Haiti by François Duvalier and settled there just as he appointed himself president for life and used state terrorism to secure his position. Dunham became involved once again in Voodoo, becoming a mambo. She turned the estate into a tourist resort, desperately trying to keep poor Haitians (she called them squatters) off the grounds and find ways to finance the tremendous cost of the property. During this period she was also a cultural consultant in Dakar. An American who was considered an expert on Haiti who might also be a settler in Haiti, and an African-American whose essentialized conception of African dance were not welcomed by a modernizing and nationalist Senegal, Dunham’s intercultural position was increasingly under question.
In 1967 Dunham began the final chapter of her life when she moved to East St. Louis. Her brother-in-law was a professor at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. He connected her with the university, hoping she could choreograph productions there or become a professor of dance. The civil rights era had brought tremendous interest in bringing people of color into the university, and education was heavily funded during this baby boomer era. SIU was a state school which traditionally served students from the farmlands which surrounded it. Increasingly, however, it hoped to attract students from East St. Louis. East St. Louis (the half of St. Louis which is on the eastern side of the Mississippi and thus in Illinois and not Missouri) was a picture of white flight. Once a prosperous town, it had hollowed out after World War II as jobs dried up and the middle class moved out. Now a majority black community, it suffered from poverty and high crime rates. SIU saw this as a community it could serve, and helped fund Dunham when she established her Performing Arts Training Center (PATC) there in June 1967.
Now in her sixties, Dunham put dancing aside and focused her energies on Leclerc and the PATC. She slowly built up the PATC as a community institution, drawing men — who in this age of Black Power felt dancing was feminine — into the center through drumming lessons. She taught children and added classes in anthropology and other topics. She took her children company to the White House, mobilizing the community and demonstrating the power of the arts to bring people together. When community members were arrested, she followed them to jail to make sure the police did not abuse them. After the assassination of Martin Luther King, Dunham worked with the community to stop the self-destructive rioting which was tearing her neighborhood apart. While she was still under FBI scrutiny, Dunham was able in the late 1960s to perform the political choreography that she wanted.
Dunham was a vital person and had a long life. Although increasingly frail and wheelchair-bound, Dunham lived to be 93 years old, passing in 2006. By the time of her death, she was remembered as a pioneer dancer and civil rights advocate, and much of the controversy about her earlier career was forgotten. Today she is remembered as a major force in American dance as well as in anthropology.
