[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 71 (Wednesday, June 7, 2006)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1039-E1041]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




 MOVING THE WORLD KATHERINE DUNHAM CHOREOGRAPHED A LIFE THAT STRETCHED 
                            BEYOND THE STAGE

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. CHARLES B. RANGEL

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                        Wednesday, June 7, 2006

  Mr. RANGEL. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to pay tribute to a truly 
remarkable woman, Ms. Katherine Dunham. A woman of astounding grace and 
character, Ms. Dunham has altered for the better both our country and 
world. We recently lost Ms. Dunham on May 21, 2006, at the age of 96 at 
an assisted living facility in New York.
  Born Katherine Mary Dunham in Chicago, III on June 22, 1909, and 
raised in Glen Ellyn, Ill, Dunham was fascinating from the very 
beginning. The author of a published short story in a magazine edited 
by W.E.B. DuBois at the young age of 12 she had the gift for the 
written word. She was class poet in high school, and later wrote a 
memoir entitled, ``A Touch of Innocence''.
  Ms. Dunham was an enchanting beauty who often danced with a sound 
sense of rhythm and eroticism. Dunham was always combining and changing 
methods of dance, the sign of the true innovator within. Katherine 
Dunham was a pioneer in the first in many areas for blacks. She was 
among the first black artists to form a ballet troupe and achieve 
renown as a modem dancer and choreographer on Broadway and in 
Hollywood. She was responsible for exposing to mass audiences the other 
side of black artistic expression, a side rarely seen. She made people 
in the 1930's and 1940's see and understand black dance as ``more than 
tap and minstrelsy''.
  She was also one of the first black choreographers to work for the 
Metropolitan Opera. Many admired Dunham because she amassed so much in 
a country and time where few opportunities for blacks existed.
  She will forever remain an inspiration to many who seek guidance in 
her wisdom and words. She was noted for her no nonsense approach to the 
way of life as stated here, ``Don't be nervous, don't be tired and 
above all, don't be bored. Those are the three destroyers of freedom''. 
Her insight goes far beyond dance and choreography, but into the real 
human dilemma. It was stated that, ``she was speaking less about dance 
and more about an area of equal concern: human rights''. All those who 
knew her dignified heart of compassion could not help but follow her 
lead.
  As a human rights activist, she spoke out publicly about the United 
States' position on deporting Haitian refugees. Dunham was so 
passionate about the matter that in 1992 she went on a 47 day hunger 
strike to prove her point. One notable activist, Harry Belafonte 
stressed the notion that, ``She didn't perform miracles; she performed 
acts of human kindness, which should be viewed as a miracle in 
itself''.
  With age Ms. Dunham sought to spread her knowledge to especially 
young people. She wanted them to grow up with the adequate capabilities 
and skills necessary to live in today's ever-changing world. She kept a 
small museum of artifacts about her career with her in East St. Louis, 
Ill., where she educated local children including Jackie JoynerKersee, 
the Olympic long jumper, and filmmakers Reginald and Warrington Hudlin.
  When asked about her work with the youth she felt she was ``trying to 
steer them into something more constructive than genocide''. In a way, 
maintaining relations with the youth of today kept Dunham youthful, a 
quality she never lost. In a New York Times report done on her a few 
years back, she mentioned, ``Did you ever see photographs of elderly 
divas trying to look sexy?''
  I enter into the Record with pleasure the article published in the 
Washington Post and New York Times for their in-depth look at Katherine 
Dunham for both her artistic and humanitarian efforts. She has truly 
left her mark on our society and I will always remember her for that. 
We must keep her memory alive in our hearts and minds so that 
generations after us will know who she was and what she did. One cannot 
speak of dance and innovation without mentioning Katherine Dunham, for 
she has without a doubt moved our world.

                  [The Washington Post, May 23, 2006]

                            Moving the World

                           (By Sarah Kaufman)

       It was a bitterly cold winter day three years ago when I 
     last saw the pioneering choreographer Katherine Dunham teach. 
     She was rolled into the Howard University dance studio in her 
     wheelchair, bundled up like a prized antique. First a thick 
     fur blanket was peeled off, then a woolen wrap, and then 
     Dunham herself was revealed, somewhat hunched, wearing lots 
     of gold jewelry. Peering through her oversize glasses at the 
     more than 100 students sitting on the floor in front of her, 
     she got right to work.
       ``Think of everything you learn from me today as part of a 
     way of life,'' she announced in a low, raspy voice. ``Now--
     breathe.''
       This was not as simple as it sounds. For Dunham, a tireless 
     activist who died Sunday at the age of 96, invested every 
     aspect of her life--indeed, you could say, every breath--with 
     meticulous attention and an unflinching eye.

[[Page E1040]]

       And on this day in January 2003, that eye didn't see much 
     it liked. Dunham hollered at the dancers to tilt their heads 
     back, to hold their stomach muscles in, to undulate with the 
     breath inside them. Then, unsatisfied with the beat that the 
     drummers alongside her were producing, she leaned out of her 
     wheelchair, grabbed one of their drumsticks and began keeping 
     time on the table in front of her.
       A few beats later, that tiny old lady had all the drummers 
     grooving together and the whole room full of young adults 
     breathing in unison.
       Dunham's dance technique and her way of life went hand in 
     hand. She was inquisitive, blazingly energetic and exacting 
     as a dancer and a choreographer, but she didn't leave those 
     qualities behind after the curtain fell. Her whole long life 
     was about questions and activism and energy. The path that 
     led her to Broadway, Hollywood and concert stages around the 
     world eventually took her to Haiti, where she lived for a 
     number of years, working feverishly and, to her great 
     distress, ultimately unsuccessfully to bring about change for 
     that nation's desperately poor people.
       In her unparalleled career in dance, where she educated the 
     world about the power of African dance as found throughout 
     the diaspora, Dunham mixed academic research and showbiz 
     flair. An anthropologist as well as a choreographer, she 
     studied dance in the Caribbean islands, blending movements 
     she found there with Western dance. Her style was not 
     scholarly; she reveled in eroticism. She sought not to re-
     create specific rites but to transport the audience the way a 
     spiritual experience might. And she wasn't afraid to use sex 
     to do this. A sensuous performer, she frequently wore 
     costumes that revealed well-muscled thighs and ample curves.
       There were other dancers interested in Afro-Caribbean 
     arts--Pearl Primus, also an anthropologist, for one--but 
     Dunham had the most far-reaching success, perhaps because of 
     her utter fearlessness. She founded her company in the 1930s, 
     when a predominantly black dance troupe was unheard of. Her 
     voluptuousness as a dancer made her especially marketable--
     because, let's face it, audiences at that time were not 
     especially sensitive to the art she was creating. She caught 
     the eye of ballet master George Balanchine, who created the 
     role of the sexpot Georgia Brown for her in the 1940 Broadway 
     hit ``Cabin in the Sky.'' Dunham and her company performed in 
     other Broadway revues, and she also made her mark 
     choreographing for film, in 1943's ``Stormy Weather'' and 
     several others, in Hollywood and abroad.
       But her twin artistic achievements were her body of 
     choreography--works such as ``L'Ag'Ya,'' a story of love and 
     death, and ``Shango,'' drawn from Trinidadian cult rituals--
     and the development of her own method of dancing.
       ``Dunham technique'' became part of the bedrock of American 
     modern dance, like the techniques of Martha Graham, Jose 
     Limon and Merce Cunningham. Through her own flamboyance and 
     interpretive beauty as a performer, as well as her rigor as a 
     teacher, she raised African-based dance to a new level.
       Growing up in an America that offered few opportunities for 
     blacks, Dunham served as an inspiration to black artists who 
     saw her achievements as especially formidable given the 
     racism of the times.
       ``She set the bar for attaining excellence in art and she 
     instilled in us a great sense of pride in our blackness,'' 
     said singer Harry Belafonte, speaking by phone yesterday from 
     California. Belafonte and his wife, Julie, were close friends 
     of Dunham's for half a century, he said. Julie was a member 
     of Dunham's company; Harry credits Dunham with encouraging 
     him to investigate the music of her beloved Haiti.
       Without Dunham's effort to ``reveal to me the beauty of 
     that music,'' Belafonte said, he would never have recorded 
     songs like the gentle, lilting ode ``Yellow Bird.''
       However attuned she was to musical beauty and island 
     mysticism, Dunham could breathe fire in the studio. She was a 
     legendary taskmaster, and even in her nineties, during that 
     class I witnessed at Howard as part of the International 
     Association of Blacks in Dance Conference, she was capable of 
     whipping her students into a lather.
       ``Now think of your anal opening!'' she cried at one point. 
     ``Does everyone know what your anal opening is? Think of a 
     pole from the top of your head through that hole. That's your 
     strength! ``
       ``Don't be nervous, don't be tired and above all, don't be 
     bored,'' she lectured them. ``Those are the three destroyers 
     of freedom of movement.''
       She called on the dancers to be ``strong and easy at the 
     same time,'' swaying in her wheelchair, her arms floating, 
     responding to the drumbeat with a remarkable fluidity.
       Her eyes never strayed from the dancers, who by the end of 
     the class were trying to keep up the relentless tempo on 
     their tiptoes, with bent knees, stamping and shimmying their 
     shoulders, adding turns if they could. Dunham technique seeks 
     to balance tricky polyrhythmic equations, with the head 
     nodding out one beat and torso and legs keeping time with 
     another.
       The trick, say those who have mastered it, is to move with 
     such musical and muscular intricacy that you achieve complete 
     freedom. Dunham was scheduled to teach for an hour; she kept 
     at it for two.
       Not long after that class, I visited Dunham in her 
     Manhattan apartment. She was in bed, where she spent much of 
     her time when she wasn't making appearances. She suffered 
     from crippling arthritis and had had both kneecaps replaced. 
     Reclining against a mound of pillows, wearing a peacock-blue 
     top, and fixing me with her dark, wide-set eyes, she spoke 
     not of weakness but of strength.
       ``There is a need in the body to express itself,'' she 
     said. ``Every culture has its own form of physical 
     expression. An unfortunate thing about today--about Western 
     dance--is it's too competitive in feeling. I don't dance 
     because I can do this movement better than you. I do it 
     because it's what I feel, and want to do.''
       ``When I first saw however-present and powerful dance 
     was,'' she said, ``it came as a wonderful revelation.''
       Pressed regarding about her views on dance, though, it 
     became clear she was speaking less about dance and more about 
     an area of equal concern: human rights.
       ``It's a real job to recognize dance at all,'' she 
     continued. ``Until our Western need to compete begins to slow 
     down and becomes a need to feel and love and express motion 
     and care for our inner selves as well as our outer selves . . 
     . if we can find a way to live in union with other people --
     '' She looked out the window at her view of the skyline. ``We 
     have to love ourselves, love what we are doing, and find a 
     way to express these things in unity with other people.''
       Dunham banged up against politics as she sought to spread 
     her teaching in the island she so loved.
       ``Long before she could teach the healthy minds, she needed 
     the healthy bodies,'' Belafonte said. She found herself 
     feeding the students, seeing to their health care and 
     welfare, and eventually spreading this concern into a 
     wholesale human rights activism that included a hunger strike 
     of 47 days in 1992 to protest the U.S. policy of deporting 
     Haitian refugees. Sadly, most of her good works there came to 
     naught without government support to sustain them.
       ``She didn't perform miracles, she performed acts of human 
     kindness,'' Belafonte said. ``Which should be viewed as a 
     miracle in itself.''
                                  ____


         How Katherine Dunham Revealed Black Dance to the World

                         (By Jennifer Dunning)

       Whatever else Katherine Dunham was in her long and 
     productive life, which ended on Sunday at 96, she was a 
     radiantly beautiful woman whose warmth and sense of self 
     spread like honey on the paths before her.
       How could anyone be stopped by the color of her skin after 
     her invincibly lush sensuality and witty intelligence had 
     seduced audiences on Broadway, in Hollywood films and in 
     immensely popular dance shows that toured the world? And how 
     could anyone cram black American dance into one or two 
     conveniently narrow categories--or for that matter ignore the 
     good strong roots that would one day grow green stems and 
     leaves--with the vision of her company's lavishly theatrical 
     African and Caribbean dance revues in mind?
       Miss Dunham was one of the first American artists to focus 
     on black dance and dancers as prime material for the stage. 
     She burst into public consciousness in the 1940's, at a time 
     when opportunities were increasing for black performers in 
     mainstream theater and film, at least temporarily. But there 
     was little middle ground there between the exotic and the 
     demeaning everyday stereotypes.
       Ms. Dunham's dance productions were certainly exotic, and 
     sometimes fell into uncomfortable cliches. But a 1987 look at 
     her work, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater's ``Magic of 
     Katherine Dunham'' program, confirmed that she also evoked 
     ordinary lives that were lived with ordinary dignity.
       Miss Dunham, as she was universally known, was by no means 
     the only dance artist to push for the recognition of black 
     dance in the 1940's, when Pearl Primus pushed, too, though a 
     great deal less glamorously. But though Miss Dunham's 
     academic credentials as an anthropologist were impeccable, 
     including a doctorate from the University of Chicago, it was 
     her gift for seduction that helped most to pave the way for 
     choreographers like Donald McKayle, Talley Beatty and Alvin 
     Ailey, who were the first wave of what is today an 
     established and influential part of the larger world of 
     American modern dance.
       Ailey's first encounter with her, as a newly stage-struck 
     boy in his mid-teens, says a great deal about Miss Dunham's 
     appeal. Intrigued by handbills advertising her 1943 
     ``Tropical Revue,'' he ventured into the Biltmore Theater in 
     downtown Los Angeles, his hometown, where it was playing. 
     There he was plunged into a world of color, light and heat 
     that was populated by highly trained dancers with a gift 
     for powerful immediacy, who were dressed in subtle, 
     stylish costumes designed by John Pratt, Miss Dunham's 
     husband. After the show, Ailey followed the crowd making 
     its way backstage to her dressing room and was again 
     stunned when the door opened on a vision of beautiful 
     hanging fabrics and carpeting, paintings, books, flowers 
     and baskets of fruit. And there was La Dunham, dressed in 
     vividly colored silks and exuding irresistible gaiety and 
     warmth.
       Ailey returned to the show several times a week, let into 
     the theater by the Dunham dancers who had looked so 
     unapproachably

[[Page E1041]]

     exotic on that first backstage visit. And he was still more 
     than a little in love with her when he invited her to create 
     for his company ``The Magic of Katherine Dunham,'' a program 
     of pieces that had not been seen for a quarter-century. Miss 
     Dunham's dancers, who remained close to her and to one 
     another throughout her life, swarmed into the studios to help 
     her work with the young performers.
       Most of the Ailey dancers did not appreciate Miss Dunham's 
     iron perfectionism or the unusual demands of her technique, a 
     potent but challenging blend of Afro-Caribbean, ballet and 
     modern dance. And she was not the easiest of women. I 
     remember speaking with her before a public interview we were 
     to do in April 1993. Addicted to CNN, she had just learned of 
     the fiery, tragic end to the F.B.I's seige of the Branch 
     Davidian compound in Waco, Tex., that morning, and that was 
     all that she could talk about, off and on the stage, despite 
     her promises to discuss her work.
       Her horror was real, as was her sense of social justice. 
     She has been criticized for not denouncing the Duvaliers for 
     their dictatorship in Haiti, where she owned a home. But she 
     had also sponsored a medical clinic in Port-au-Prince, and 
     she stayed on for many years in desolate, impoverished East 
     St. Louis, Ill., where she established a museum of artifacts 
     pertaining to her career and taught local children including 
     Jackie Joyner-Kersee, the Olympic long jumper, and the 
     filmmakers Reginald and Warrington Hudlin.
       ``I was trying to steer them into something more 
     constructive than genocide,'' she said of the children in a 
     1991 interview with me in The New York Times. ``Everyone 
     needs, if not a culture hero, a culturally heroic society. 
     There is nothing stronger in a man than the need to grow.''
       That idealistic, eloquent self was infused with a streak of 
     no-nonsense practicality.
       ``I don't like that `accept,' '' Miss Dunham, still a 
     vibrant beauty at 91, said during a Times interview six years 
     ago in response to a middle-aged visitor who insisted on 
     talking to her about the acceptance and embrace of old age. 
     ``I would just let the whole thing go. Just be there for it, 
     centimeter by centimeter.'' Then it was time for the photo 
     session.
       Her eyes seemed to widen even more invitingly and her gaze 
     to grow even warmer as she looked into the eye of the camera 
     and asked, ``Did you ever see photographs of elderly divas 
     trying to look sexy?''

                          ____________________