Katherine Dunham
May. 22nd, 2006 08:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mojosmomI am currently reading Katherine Dunham's Island Possessed, about Haiti and her time doing fieldwork there. This morning, I got up, fed the cats and then, as I was brushing my teeeth, I heard from the radio, " . . . dancer, anthropologist, civil rights activist . . ." and I knew what was coming next: " . . . has died at the age of 96." I suppose it's no surprise that someone dies at 96, but not when I'm in the midst of her book!
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.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted on Mon, May. 22, 2006
Dance legend Katherine Dunham dies
BY CAROLYN P. SMITH
News-Democrat
--
Katherine Dunham, a legenday dancer, choreographer and social force who considered East St. Louis her home, died Sunday in her sleep. She was 96.
Charlotte Ottley, executive liaison for Katherine Dunham Legacy Affairs, said Dunhamdied at an assisted living facility in New York.
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 African American 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.
"Going to the West Indies," which she first visited as a University of Chicago graduate student in anthropology, "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. 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.
She wasn't one to listen to others. "I couldn't imagine someone else directing me to dance," Dunham said. An avid reader, a devotee of the History Channel and National Geographic specials, she never felt she had to choose between her twin passions of art and anthropology.
Like many dancers, she was never good at managing money. A few years ago, she was living in near squalor in an old house in East St. Louis, until friends stepped in to help.
The Library of Congress owns a 1,000-piece collection of Dunham photographs and ephemera; a $1 million grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation was received to organize the material.
Dunham seems less upset at the notion, viewing herself, as she does, as more than "just a dancer." She wants to teach people more than dance. "Find out who you are. Know yourself. Work toward understanding the humanity in other cultures. Decide as early as you can what you want to do and work steadily toward that. Be productive."
Dunham was born in 1909 in the Chicago suburb of Glen Ellyn, not East St. Louis. Many people didn't realize that, because her legacy and achievements became a significant point of local pride.
Dunham chose the metro-east in 1967, when she was already world famous and 58 years old.
In June, local leaders held a celebration when Dunham decided to return to East St. Louis after living for six years in New York. She was lauded with a grand procession of 96 drummers crossing the river into East St. Louis.
Dancer Lula Washington traveled from Los Angeles to take part in celebration and called Dunham a "legend and a pioneer for all of the African-American dancers in the community," Washington added, "She worked with the children that no one else would spend the time and energy on."
"We're gathered here to honor a living legend," East St. Louis Mayor Carl Officer said at the ceremony. "Katherine Dunham means history, tradition, culture, education and spirit."
Dunham helped create a performing arts center and dance anthropology program at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Ann Walker was the first graduate from SIUE who went through the Dunham program.
"I don't think East St. Louis ever really fully understood what they had in having Ms. Dunham here," Walker said. "I venture to say that there will be some people who will be in the next few days learning aspects of her life that they never took advantage of finding out while she was here among us."
In October, Dunham gave a lecture at SIUE's Dunham Hall, a theater named in her honor.
She told the audience: "You all will me back and you don't even know it. While working in New York I felt something was missing in my life and I knew it was East St. Louis. To rectify things, I came home."
Dunham addressed the state of society and the changes she would like to see made by youths.
"The world is a hard place to live in now, and I sympathize with the young people because they have no direction," she said. "The stars don't seem as bright as they did when I was growing up. The universe is tired of being, and it's our fault."
Dunham acknowledged her comments weren't uplifting and admitted she wanted her lecture be a "wake-up call."
"We are destroying ourselves by not appreciating what we have and what we are," she said.
Dunham then changed the tone of her lecture by encouraging the audience with words of wisdom.
"We are great people," she said. "But you must spread joy. If you do, you will come alive. Don't lose faith and carry love with you - unselfish, caring, limitless love."
Although famous, Dunham was not wealthy. A $200,000 state grant and volunteer labor helped redesign her home in East St. Louis to make it wheelchair accessible and comfortable to live in once again. But work on the home did not get completed in time for Dunham to make the move back to the community she loved.
Ray Coleman, a member of an advisory board for the Katherine Dunham Center, said: "Let us all remember the great humanitarian she was and remember that she has left a legacy across the country and the world that we can all be proud of. While we mourn her passing let's not forget to support the jewel she left here in East St. Louis, the museum, personal residence and other property that should be kept as the heart and soul of the culture that's East St. Louis."
Such a great lady.
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.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted on Mon, May. 22, 2006
Dance legend Katherine Dunham dies
BY CAROLYN P. SMITH
News-Democrat
--
Katherine Dunham, a legenday dancer, choreographer and social force who considered East St. Louis her home, died Sunday in her sleep. She was 96.
Charlotte Ottley, executive liaison for Katherine Dunham Legacy Affairs, said Dunhamdied at an assisted living facility in New York.
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 African American 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.
"Going to the West Indies," which she first visited as a University of Chicago graduate student in anthropology, "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. 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.
She wasn't one to listen to others. "I couldn't imagine someone else directing me to dance," Dunham said. An avid reader, a devotee of the History Channel and National Geographic specials, she never felt she had to choose between her twin passions of art and anthropology.
Like many dancers, she was never good at managing money. A few years ago, she was living in near squalor in an old house in East St. Louis, until friends stepped in to help.
The Library of Congress owns a 1,000-piece collection of Dunham photographs and ephemera; a $1 million grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation was received to organize the material.
Dunham seems less upset at the notion, viewing herself, as she does, as more than "just a dancer." She wants to teach people more than dance. "Find out who you are. Know yourself. Work toward understanding the humanity in other cultures. Decide as early as you can what you want to do and work steadily toward that. Be productive."
Dunham was born in 1909 in the Chicago suburb of Glen Ellyn, not East St. Louis. Many people didn't realize that, because her legacy and achievements became a significant point of local pride.
Dunham chose the metro-east in 1967, when she was already world famous and 58 years old.
In June, local leaders held a celebration when Dunham decided to return to East St. Louis after living for six years in New York. She was lauded with a grand procession of 96 drummers crossing the river into East St. Louis.
Dancer Lula Washington traveled from Los Angeles to take part in celebration and called Dunham a "legend and a pioneer for all of the African-American dancers in the community," Washington added, "She worked with the children that no one else would spend the time and energy on."
"We're gathered here to honor a living legend," East St. Louis Mayor Carl Officer said at the ceremony. "Katherine Dunham means history, tradition, culture, education and spirit."
Dunham helped create a performing arts center and dance anthropology program at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Ann Walker was the first graduate from SIUE who went through the Dunham program.
"I don't think East St. Louis ever really fully understood what they had in having Ms. Dunham here," Walker said. "I venture to say that there will be some people who will be in the next few days learning aspects of her life that they never took advantage of finding out while she was here among us."
In October, Dunham gave a lecture at SIUE's Dunham Hall, a theater named in her honor.
She told the audience: "You all will me back and you don't even know it. While working in New York I felt something was missing in my life and I knew it was East St. Louis. To rectify things, I came home."
Dunham addressed the state of society and the changes she would like to see made by youths.
"The world is a hard place to live in now, and I sympathize with the young people because they have no direction," she said. "The stars don't seem as bright as they did when I was growing up. The universe is tired of being, and it's our fault."
Dunham acknowledged her comments weren't uplifting and admitted she wanted her lecture be a "wake-up call."
"We are destroying ourselves by not appreciating what we have and what we are," she said.
Dunham then changed the tone of her lecture by encouraging the audience with words of wisdom.
"We are great people," she said. "But you must spread joy. If you do, you will come alive. Don't lose faith and carry love with you - unselfish, caring, limitless love."
Although famous, Dunham was not wealthy. A $200,000 state grant and volunteer labor helped redesign her home in East St. Louis to make it wheelchair accessible and comfortable to live in once again. But work on the home did not get completed in time for Dunham to make the move back to the community she loved.
Ray Coleman, a member of an advisory board for the Katherine Dunham Center, said: "Let us all remember the great humanitarian she was and remember that she has left a legacy across the country and the world that we can all be proud of. While we mourn her passing let's not forget to support the jewel she left here in East St. Louis, the museum, personal residence and other property that should be kept as the heart and soul of the culture that's East St. Louis."
Such a great lady.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-05-22 03:08 pm (UTC)http://www.cnn.com/2006/SHOWBIZ/05/22/obit.dunham.ap/index.html
It's the AP article you've cited, but there are two photographs.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-22 03:24 pm (UTC)