Dance legend Katherine Dunham dies
BY CAROLYN P. SMITH
Belleville News-Democrat, IL
Mon, May. 22, 2006
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."
Contact reporter Carolyn P. Smith at csmith@bnd.com or 239-2503.
http://www.belleville.com/mld/belleville/news/breaking_news/14638458.htm
