15803: Beckett on Katherine Dunham (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Beckett <beckett@uchicago.edu>

I found this piece a bit light on its coverage, but it did make the
front page of the "Metro" section in the Chicago Tribune. I would
like to add that the conference was a great success! Ms. Dunham gave
a great talk in the morning, followed by a more in-depth discussion
of her current project (turning Habitation Leclerc into a botanical
garden) by Cameron Brohman. In ther afternoon, there was a conference
dealing with the impact and legacy of Ms. Dunham's work on
anthropology.

The article does not mention this, but I would like to add that the
conference was made possible by the support of the Center for Latin
American Studies at the University of Chicago and International House
(as well as many others). Thanks to all those who help and all those
who came!




--------------------
Legend lives on, teaching dance of life only she can
--------------------

By Ron Grossman
Tribune staff reporter

June 8, 2003

After Katherine Dunham addressed a University of Chicago symposium
Friday devoted to the life and work of the 93-year old performer,
scholar and social activist, scarcely a question was asked.

It's not that she hadn't given her audience food for thought. Dunham
recalled the hunger of her own student days on the school's Hyde Park
campus, 67 years ago. She spoke of her role in shaping modern
anthropology, and of founding her pioneering Afro-American dance
troupe.

But those with questions couldn't get to the microphone. It was
monopolized by a long line of admirers who simply wanted to pay
homage to her.

A tall, willowy woman bowed and thanked Dunham for providing the
example that inspired her to found her own dance company. Another
recalled how much it meant to a black child in the 1940s to know that
a black woman had been applauded by audiences around the world.

Lester Goodman came to the microphone to remind Dunham that, in the
1950s, she had summoned him to fill in for one of her dancers in a
performance at Chicago's famed Chez Paree nightclub.

"It was the finest day of my life," said Goodman, 88, whose business
card still reads "entertainer."

Dunham herself hasn't danced in years. Arthritis confines her to a
wheelchair, but she is still a consummate performer. After her
speech, she received a small delegation of students while stretched
on a bed in her room at the university's International House.
Spotting a photographer, she regally pulled herself up into a more
photogenic pose.

"When I first came here in 1928, there were few black faces on
campus, just me and my brother, one or two others," Dunham told the
students. "In those years, I was always hungry, both in the pit of my
stomach and spiritually."

The physical hunger came from having barely enough money to get
through college. Her spiritual hunger came from wanting to know where
in life she might fit in. Her father was a black man, her mother
French-Canadian. Born in Chicago, she grew up in suburban Glen Ellyn
and Joliet.

In Hyde Park, she realized that American society was divided by a
color line--and that she was on the other side of it. Once, she and a
few friends went to a local restaurant where they knew she wouldn't
be served.

"We were determined to make a point," said Dunham, who never lost
that resolve. When she was 83, she went on a 47-day hunger strike to
protest the government's turning away of boatloads of Haitians
seeking asylum in the U.S.

But at the U. of C., she also discovered that in the academic
discipline of anthropology all people were considered equal. Her
professors urged her to do field work in the Caribbean, a project she
started even before finishing her bachelor's degree. She went first
to Bermuda and other islands. But their cultures, which still bore
palpable signs of their long years as European colonies, were too
reminiscent of her own experience of segregation.

Then she found Haiti, independent since it repelled a French military
force in the early 19th Century. There she fell in love, not just
with the people, but also with a heavily wooded estate built by the
last French general for his wife in Port-au-Prince.

When she returned to Chicago to work as a librarian, she put away a
few dollars a week for years for a down payment on the property,
Habitation Leclerc, which she would like to leave to the Haitian
people as a kind of urban national park.

"Do you know what love is?" Dunham asked. "It's what's left of tender
caring after the thrill of pursuit and the triumph of capture have
passed."

As an anthropologist, Dunham took the formal stiffness out of field
reporting, said Gage Averill, the New York University musicologist
who introduced her talk. She pioneered what is now called
"participant observation" by joining the people she was studying in
the dances of their religious celebrations.

She was also one of the first anthropologists to use a movie camera
to record her fieldwork, though not always successfully. "A lot of it
is me panning the camera, looking up at a palm tree."

Andrew Apter, a U. of C. anthropology professor who participated in
the symposium, noted another breakthrough.

"Before her, anthropologists looked down on native dance forms as
being only the icing on the cultural cake," Apter said. "Ms. Dunham
taught us that dance is an integral part of the religion and culture
of a society like Haiti's."

In turn, Dunham recalled, her Haitian dance partners taught her
something important. A dancer since childhood, she had been
struggling to find a suitable form of personal expression.

"An aspiring artist knows they are in need of spiritual nourishment,"
Dunham said.

Finding it in Haiti, she founded Dunham's School of Dance, which
trained a formative generation of African-American performers,
including Eartha Kitt. Dunham herself played on Broadway and in
vaudeville houses whose seating areas were still segregated.

She told a story about how in Louisville, a group of black fans told
her they weren't allowed to buy tickets. Before coming out for her
curtain call, Dunham pinned on her back a sign then ubiquitous in
America: "White Only."

Yet neither that nor similar experiences, or some economic hard times
in recent years, have taken away her perennial hope for a better
tomorrow, she said while saying goodbye.

"Those early films of mine might be boring, but they're also
telling," she said. "I'm always looking up the palm tree, from bottom
to top. Never downward."


Copyright (c) 2003, Chicago Tribune


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