Katherine Dunham: Katherine Dunham, the groundbreaking choreographer, anthropologist and social activist who founded America's first major black modern dance company, was an indomitable cultural figure once called a "One-Woman Revolution". Dunham brushed past barriers and social prejudices to integrate the rhythms she learned in Haiti, Brazil and Cuba into American formal dance.
During Dunham's restless, passionate life, she took turns as a published anthropologist, the toast of Broadway, a dancer in Hollywood films and a mentor to young dancers in East St Louis, Illinois, one of America's poorest communities. Her compositions, often showcased in popular revues, were an inspiration to young dancers such as Alvin Ailey and José Limon, who would win greater acclaim than she did in the modern dance world.
"Katherine Dunham lived through an America that was deeply segregated, where race was always an issue of crisis," said actor Harry Belafonte, a friend and supporter. "For her to have made the contribution she did to culture, through her dance and her intellect, enriched America.
She brought, through her art and intellectual passion and power, an insight into black life that shaped everyone's thinking of who we are."
Dunham was born in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, on June 22nd, 1909, the daughter of a black dry cleaner and a French Canadian mother who died when Dunham was a small child.
At the University of Chicago, she also became a promising anthropology student, winning the Julius Rosenwald Foundation fellowship to study anthropology in the Caribbean. But she always loved dance. At 21, she founded the Ballet Negre in Chicago.
Elizabeth Chin, an associate professor of anthropology at Occidental College who studied with Dunham in 1993 in St Louis, said Dunham taught the isolated movements of body parts that are now a staple of modern dance. "She was one of the really great African American pioneers of modern dance."
Dunham aimed for a popular audience. She introduced New York to her shimmy in Le Jazz Hot in 1940. She created Georgia Brown for George Balanchine in his Cabin in the Sky, (though she did not receive a choreography credit). She appeared in Hollywood films such as Carnival of Rhythm and Stormy Weather. She took her popular Broadway Tropical Revue on an American tour that would inspire a teenage Ailey. Eventually, her company would perform in more than 50 countries, until well into the 1960s. She choreographed dozens of works that plunged modern dance into unabashed ethnicity, among them Field Hands and Drum Ritual.
Dunham often turned down invitations to perform for segregated audiences in the south, and when she found her company booked at a whites-only theatre, she lectured the audiences on the evils of segregation and told them to integrate if they wanted her company back. During a second World War-era tour, she filed successful racial discrimination lawsuits against hotels in Chicago and Cincinnati. Her complaints against similar conditions in Brazil, where she was enormously popular, are credited with providing the impetus for a Bill against segregation there.
In 1951, she shocked audiences with Southland, a dance about a Southern lynching that Dunham believes hurt her efforts to obtain US sponsorship for her overseas travels.
Dunham married her costume designer, John Pratt, in 1941, and they adopted an orphan, Marie-Christine, from Martinique. Pratt died in 1986.
Dunham made international news from East St Louis in 1992, when she undertook a 47-day hunger strike to protest US policy of turning back Haitian refugees to their military-ruled island.
In the early 1990s Belafonte found her bedridden and stricken with arthritis. He underwrote her medical bills and found her a home in an assisted-living facility in Manhattan, with the help of friends such as actors Whoopi Goldberg and Danny Glover.
Since then, Dunham lived comfortably, her life punctuated by honours and accolades which included 48 honorary doctorates and a French Legion of Honour.
Katherine Dunham: born June 22nd, 1909; died May 21st, 2006.