Arts matriarch and activist of ESL passes at 96
By American staff
“She paved the way not only for East St. Louis, but for the world,” Kati Stovall said of the legendary dancer, choreographer, activist and author Katherine Dunham,
Miss Dunham, who left worldwide fame to teach the arts in tiny, impoverished East St. Louis, died at the Manhattan assisted living facility where she lived.
Miss Dunham was 96. The cause of death is still not known, according to Donna Pollion, executive administrator at the Katherine Dunham Centers for the Arts and Humanities in East St. Louis.
Services are scheduled for Friday at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel in New York, contingent upon Miss Dunham’s daughter, Marie-Christine Dunham Pratt, making timely travel arrangements from her home in Rome.
Miss Dunham was recognized, honored and adored as “Mother” by countless artists all over the African Diaspora. She literally was the godmother (and namesake) of Kati Stovall, whose mother, Jeanelle Stovall, was Miss Dunham’s longtime assistant.
Stovall said she last talked to Miss Dunham on Mother’s Day over the phone. “She was vibrant as always, making jokes. She sounded great and in good spirits,” Stovall said.
“For creative dance, she is the matriarch,” Darlene Roy, a long-time friend, said of Miss Dunham. “She is the one who taught the Debbie Allens, people who you would never think are of the Katherine Dunham School. They owe their creative involvement to her.”
Roy met Miss Dunham through ESL poet laureate Eugene B. Redmond and his writers’ club. Redmond, a core intimate of Miss Dunham’s, was traveling in Nigeria at the time of her death.
“Learning of Miss Dunham’s death while here in Nigeria has wrought a riot of emotions and thoughts,” Redmond wrote from Ibadan.
“I am eternally grateful for her intellectual, familial, humanistic, spiritual, artistic and cultural guidance.”
Though caught far from home by news of his friend and mentor’s death, Redmond had in his traveling papers extensive images of Miss Dunham and books about her, as well as notes for an epic poem about the icon he has worked on for 15 years.
In a flood of memories, Redmond noted, “I remember leading Miss D’s Performing Arts Training Center Company in a command performance for Coretta Scott King in Atlanta in 1968.”
Redmond has taught and shared her legacy all over the world, including in Nigeria. On Tuesday night in Ibadan, at a celebration of Redmond’s Drumvoices Revue #14, scores of Nigerians paid tribute to Miss Dunham, Redmond said, “asking for her safe passage through the ‘ancestrails’ and signing a homemade card of condolence that will be presented at a memorial in East St. Louis later this summer.”
“One of her main wishes was to spend her last days beside the Mississippi River, by East St. Louis,” Roy said. “I am saddened that was one wish that she could not have.”
World dance mother
Katherine Mary Dunham was born in Joliet, Ill. on June 22, 1909. She became one of the first African Americans to attend the University of Chicago, where she earned bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in anthropology. Supported by a Rosenwald Fellowship, she completed groundbreaking work on Caribbean and Brazilian dance anthropology as a new academic discipline.
In 1931, Miss Dunham established her first dance school in Chicago. She found important sources for her choreography and teaching in American slave dances and traditional worship services (“voodoo”) in Haiti, as well as African rhythms wherever they flourished, on the Continent or overseas.
She began one of the most successful dance careers in the American and European theater in 1934, which led to leading roles in musicals, operas and cabarets throughout the world.
Dunham crossed over from dance into other artistic forms, choreographing 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.
Though accomplished in many media and a deep inspiration as an activist, Miss Dunham was best known for bringing African and Caribbean influences to the European-dominated dance world. Hers was the nation’s first self-supporting all-black modern dance group.
“We weren’t pushing ‘Black is Beautiful,’ we just showed it,” she wrote.
The Katherine Dunham Troupe toured internationally from the 1940s to the ’60s, visiting 57 nations on six continents, performing more than 100 original works choreographed by Miss Dunham. Her success was won in the face of widespread discrimination. Dunham, always an activist, refused to perform at segregated theaters.
She also is credited with developing one of the most important methods for teaching dance, the eponymous Dunham Technique, which is still used throughout the world. Miss Dunham said it was “more than just dance or bodily executions. It is about movement, forms, love, hate, death, life, all human emotions.”
“The Dunham Technique was an exercise of the body, mind and soul,” said Pollion, of the Dunham center.
Miss Dunham’s New York studio attracted famous students, such as Eartha Kitt, Marlon Brando and James Dean.
Miss Dunham was married to theater designer John Thomas Pratt for 49 years before his death in 1986. In 1952 they adopted their daughter, Marie-Christine Dunham Pratt, from a Catholic convent nursery in Paris. She survives her parents.
Artist activist
Throughout her career, Miss Dunham used her talents, fame and resources to call public attention to social injustice. A 47-day hunger strike she undertook in 1993, at the age of 82, helped shift public opinion towards America’s oppression of Haiti, resulting in the return of Haiti’s first duly-elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Donn Johnson covered her hunger strike as a reporter for KTVI, visiting her in East St. Louis virtually every day.
“She was beautiful, even at that age,” Johnson remembered.
“She was very gentle, barely spoke above a whisper. Dick Gregory was there, her guru in how to fast. She was already quite an elderly woman.”
Johnson said though she was not strident, she was adamant that Aristide had to be returned to power and democracy to Haiti. “She seemed to take it personally,” he said.
“It’s embarrassing to be an American,” Miss Dunham said at the time.
In a long life after leaving the limelight, Miss Dunham was often decorated. She received the Grand Cross of Haiti, the Southern Cross of Brazil, Lifetime Achievement Awards from the NAACP and the Urban League, the Presidential Medal of the Arts, the Albert Schweitzer Prize at the Kennedy Center Honors, 10 honorary doctorates and membership in the French Legion of Honor.
After 1967, when she joined the faculty of Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville, Miss Dunham lived most of each year in East St. Louis, where she struggled to bring the arts to a city riddled with street crime and despair.
She established an eclectic compound of artists from around the globe, including Redmond and Harry Belafonte. Among the free classes offered were dance, African hair-braiding and woodcarving, conversational Creole, Spanish, French and Swahili, and martial arts.
Her purpose, she said, was to steer the people “into something more constructive than genocide.”
Belafonte said, “She brought, through her art and intellectual passion and power, an insight into black life that shaped everyone’s thinking of who we were.”
“She helped thousands of kids who would be in gangs and taught them music, taught them dance, photography, martial arts, you name it,” Stovall said.
“She had guest teachers from all over the world come in to get these kids off the street and to open their eyes to a whole other world.”
Cuts in funding forced her to scale back her programs in the 1980s. Despite a constant battle to pay bills, Miss Dunham continued to operate a children’s dance workshop and a museum.
In her later years, she depended on grants and the kindness of celebrities, artists and former students. Will Smith and Harry Belafonte were among those who helped her with bills.
“She didn’t end up on the street, though she was one step from it,” said Charlotte Ottley, liaison for the organization that preserves her artistic estate Ottley. “She has been on the edge and survived it all with dignity and grace.”
Pollion of the Dunham center said, “You could always go to her, because she would never turn anyone away.”
At Miss Dunham’s 96th birthday celebration last year in East St. Louis, Dunham told Roy and others: “This is wonderful, but I have a lot more birthday celebrations to come, I plan to live until I’m 100.”
In July 2003, James T. Ingram of the American asked Miss Dunham for the key to her longevity,
She said, “You have to work and you have to work at something you believe in. You have to, also, know how to love. Now, I would tell you my definition of love. I say that love is tender care, after the thrill of pursuit and the triumph of capture have passed.”
“She literally and spiritually saved my life during the ferment-fraught ‘60s,” Redmond said.
“Long live the Legacy of Empress (“Mother”) Katherine Dunham.”
Memorials and donations
At press time, the keepers of Miss Dunham’s legacy at the Dunham center were finalizing all arrangements, which were held up in part by financial limitations.
The center is accepting tax-deductible contributions to pay for the funeral service and to maintain the center itself. Call Donna Pollion at (618) 531-0403. Checks made payable to Katherine Dunham Centers for Arts and Humanities may be mailed to the center at 532 N. 10th Street, East St. Louis, IL 62201 or dropped off at the ESL branch of U.S. Bank.
The center was still running tours on Wednesday, full of noisy children learning about Miss Dunham’s legacy
In addition to the funeral tentatively scheduled for Friday in New York, celebrations of Miss Dunham’s life are being planned for June 4 at the Village Theatre in Centreville, Ill. and on the June 22 anniversary of her birth at the Dunham center and at the Missouri Historical Society. Watch the American and www.stlamerican.com for more details as they become available.
