Katherine Dunham drew from African and Caribbean traditions to revolutionize dance and create opportunities for Black dancers.
In 1950, choreographer Katherine Dunham found herself, not for the first time, walking the line between artist and entrepreneur. The debut of her balletin Santiago, Chile, commissioned by the country’s national symphony, had infuriated U.S. State Department officials. Amid the height of the Cold War, a dance depicting a brutal lynching in the antebellum South was not the kind of image-boosting arts experience that the U.S. was seeking to promote.
Dunham’s entrepreneurial instincts started early. At 15, the fledgling dancer produced and starred in an evening cabaret to raise money for her family’s struggling church. She went on to study anthropology at the University of Chicago, where she became determined to challenge negative Black stereotypes rampant in modern dance by bolstering the rich dance traditions of the Diaspora.
“She was financially supporting dozens of dancers who, because of racism and segregation in the dance and theatrical worlds, didn't have many other job opportunities,” says Joanna Dee Das, professor of dance at Washington University in St. Louis and author ofIt was at this time she made a life-changing impression on a teenage Alvin Ailey. “I couldn't believe that she put Black people on a legitimate stage,” he. “What she was doing was Afro-Caribbean. It was beauteous, it was spiritual.
A new source of funding soon emerged when President Eisenhower established an emergency fund for American performers abroad, on the premise that good American art was bad PR for the Soviet Union. Congress made it permanent in 1956. Artists like Martha Graham, Louis Armstrong and Leonard Bernstein were sent all over the world on the government’s dime. For a number of reasons — racist attitudes towards her performances, mishandled applications and, most of all,In 1954, her school shuttered.
Both carry on her legacy of giving anyone with aptitude the opportunity to participate, regardless of their means. Heather Himes Beal took dance classes at the museum for 18 years. There were times when her mother could not afford the $75 monthly tuition. “It was never a conversation about ‘Oh, you can't pay it?’” she says. “It was like, ‘okay, well, you don't have it.’ And there were plenty of people who never had it.