Geneviève Fabre, "Katherine Dunham on the French Stage (No Repeat of La Revue Nègre)" (page 7 of 7)

Altogether, the image Dunham was hoping to build through her choreographic work was more complex, based on her idea of what dance is about—that is, "the profound urge to rhythmic motion and organized patterns"[26] or "a way of knowing through the body."[27] Her models were Isadora Duncan, who let dance out of the cage, and Sergei Diaghilev, who gave structure to the new energy that Duncan was able to unleash. Dunham took this "dance revolution one step further," as one critic put it, by establishing for the modern dancer, black or white, a new vocabulary of bodily freedom, and insisting on the necessity of awakening the kinesthetic sense of both dancer and audience. Moreover, Dunham found in traditional, "authentic" material the source for modern dance forms, and in African dance the basic principle for her choreographies: the movement of the lower body (Kaiso, 498). Through the centrality she gave to the body and the attention she bore to the individuality of all performers—musicians, actors, dancers—she struck a delicate balance between training and inspiration in order to create an ensemble performance. She brought Negro dance to the concert stage and gave it visibility and its lettres de noblesse. Her anthropological training helped her develop a scientific approach to her material and helped her set a new level of literacy in dance. And with John Pratt, she achieved a new conception of design, color, and costume for the modern stage. With intelligence, imagination, and intuition, she managed to bridge anthropology and dance performance, to deal with the issue of exoticism and primitivism, and confront the opposition between tradition and modernity. Moving deftly between continents, countries, and cultures, Dunham herself spanned several worlds—historically, geographically, and artistically—illuminating in her unique way the often tragic, often glorious experience of the African diaspora.

Endnotes

1. Edward Thorpe, Black Dance. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1991, 24-30. [Return to text]

2. She shared this stage image with Baker. Soon after her triumphant arrival in Paris, the French seem to have forgotten that Josephine was born in the States and thought of her as French island Creole. In 1931 she was nominated "Queen of the French colonies" for the Colonial Exhibition. When organizers discovered that she was American, her name was withdrawn, but for many she remained la créole, especially after she starred in Jacques Offenbach's operetta in 1934 and 1940. [Return to text]

3. Quoted in Ruth Beckford, Katherine Dunham, a Biography. New York: Marcel Dekker, 1979, 106. A few other works will be mentioned in this essay: Joyce Aschenbrenner, Katherine Dunham, Dancing a Life. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002; and Kaiso, Writings by and about Katherine Dunham. Eds. VèVè Clark and Sara E. Johnson, University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. [Return to text]

4. Josephine Baker and Jo Bouillon, Josephine. New York: Harper and Row, 1976, 16-18. [Return to text]

5. Beckford, 107-8. [Return to text]

6. Her pictorial works were exhibited in many countries as she toured and are now in the East St. Louis Museum. [Return to text]

7. "Some are short, highly stylized, such as the complaint of the Cuban slave, the quadrille, the scene where three vendors squatting in the sun tease two schoolgirls, or the exquisite Bahia song. Longer numbers, like the ballets evoking the cult Shango, the terror of voodoo, the mysteries of possession, reach nearly unbearable dramatic intensity.... During eighteen months in the Caribbean Dunham made a large harvest of old tunes, of ancient steps collecting a whole world of ideas." [Return to text]

8. The review was titled "Bewitching and sensuous, Katherine Dunham takes us on a tour on the South Seas" ("Ensorcelante et sensuelle, Katherine Dunham nous fait faire le tour des mers du Sud"). Max Favalelli, "Katherine Dunham," PAN: Magazine de la vie parisienne, 10 (1948). [Return to text]

9. Favalelli quoted Baudelaire:

Son teint est pâle et chaud, la brune enchanteresse.

A dans le corps des airs vaguement maniérés

Grande et svelte en marchant comme une chasseresse

Son sourire est tranquille et ses yeux assures

Sans cesse à mes côtés s'agite le demon

Il nage autour de moi comme un air impalpable

Je l'avale et le sens qui brûle mon poumon

Et l'emplit d'un désir éternel et coupable. [Return to text]

10. "Dunham installe le tumulte noir au Théâtre de Paris." Other headlines were equally sensational: "Katherine Dunham, la négresse blanche, stages on a classical rhythm African exorcisms and Martinican mazurkas" (J.A. Baltus in the Figaro Littéraire, 1 December 1948) or "La brune incendiaire renouvelle le ballet." Another review in Arts, October 1948, further describes these exorcisms in which "voodoo is always afoot": "She sweeps on provokingly and bends her waist in the huge arms of a man whose trunk has the thickness and color of giant trees in the rain forest, Shango. In the middle of a clearing hemmed in by intertwining weeds, in the moist heat of a hothouse where pulpous fleshy orchids blossom, a priest, in order to exorcize people possessed by the devil, kills a white cock as an offering to the Yoruba god of iron." [Return to text]

11. Franc Tireur, 30 November 1948. [Return to text]

12. Réforme, 19 February 1949. "[This is] a Negro show in its proper place, for it reveals an important element of Parisian stage and music. The triumph of the Revue Nègre 24 years ago was consecrated at the Champs-Elysées before reaching Berlin, Prague and Bucharest, and this extraordinary phenomenon reminiscent of the Russian Ballets coincided in Paris with l'Exposition des Arts Décoratifs, which, one remembers, revealed African plastic arts. The popularity of black rhythms, this image of a brass instrument planted in the center of a cheerful Negro mask, a symbol of optimism, had entered our consciousness at the same time as African ornament and sculpture conquered our walls and replaced our trinkets. We understood a race through the new beauty it had come to give us by the handful, and it is thanks to this discovery that we learnt how to love blacks. In how many homes has the Angelus by Millet been replaced by a Basuto mask? And do we not listen to Robeson and Armstrong the way our fathers listened to Caruso and Paderewski? The appearance of Josephine Baker at the Folies Bergère also indirectly served as a preface to Langston Hughes and Richard Wright." [Return to text]

13. Anne Masson, "Les battements du cœur donnent le rythme des danses noires," Radio 49, 22 juillet 1949. [Return to text]

14. The company included four drummers, five singers, 17 dancers, and 14 members for technical and administrative services. On October 26, 1951, Regard magazine devoted its cover to Frances Taylor, the new dancer recruited by Dunham. On page 13 the comments read: "Back from Haiti and South America comes Katherine Dunham. Three years ago she presented Rapsodie Caraïbe. Now back from a new trip to Haiti, she has derived from it the themes of the present show. Her troupe is composed of blacks of all origins, including one authentic voodoo priest. All of them dance as though they had done nothing else in their lives. It is full of lights, rhythms, gaiety and sometimes unusual emotions." [Return to text]

15. In the Christmas 1951 issue of Tropiques, the piece titled "Interpreters of Our Aspirations" by Katherine Dunham is somewhat too general. She stresses at length the centrality of dance in life: "If one considers the elements that represent form and time, the challenge to space and gravity is among the most archaic animal expressions. As if in a continual effort to reach organic unity with nature, dance defined widely as a 'rhythmic gesture' has remained unchanged along all phases of the physical, psychological and sociological evolution of mankind from prehistoric times until now. The universal character of dance being recognized at last by historians and ancient chroniclers, writers and artists, and more recently by ethnologists and psychologists, a lively interest in it has been manifested of late. Dance is not only a spectacle and an entertainment, and it is granted a cultural and psychological dimension. In modern societies one still debates the status of Dance, which is placed in an ambiguous position between Science and Art, between performance and entertainment. In primitive societies, dance is basically a functional element in individual and collective life." Katherine Dunham, "Interpreters of our aspirations." Tropiques, la revue des troupes colonials 337 (Noël 1951), p. 62. [Return to text]

16. In her early fieldwork Dunham was careful to take precise notes, just as she would take notes on each performance throughout her career. But she also wished to have photo and later film records made as a sort of extension of, or a preliminary work for, her choreographies. These offer interesting parallels and comparisons with her actual stage works. The films Dunham used to build her archives, made by her or by others, attracted the attention in France of Jean Rouch and the Cinémathèque de la Danse, which now has a large collection and is showing them on special occasions, such as the one that recently celebrated filmmaker Maya Deren. [Return to text]

17. Anticipating problems, Dunham thought of diverse strategies: a prologue proclaiming that a protest against lynching did not mean an attack on a country she loved and respected; a narrative structure and dialogues that ingeniously combined fact and fiction (she gave the names of her actors to the characters); and using a history of lynching that was thoroughly researched. [Return to text]

18. The U.S. Ambassador had written a book defending the Ku Klux Klan; the reaction of the State Department was immediate. [Return to text]

19. During rehearsals the company itself reacted to the staging of the scene in which a white woman, played by a white actor, accuses a black man of rape by shouting the word nigger; it forced some cast members to become aware of their own color prejudices. [Return to text]

20. Whereas many books on Dunham barely mention the Paris tours and the reviews, Kaiso includes a long essay on Southland and pays more attention to the press. Kaiso, pp. 344-363, see no. 39Ð54, p. 362. [Return to text]

21. Jean Durkeim, "Sur la scène du Palais de Chaillot, Katherine Dunham monte Southland, dont le thème est un lynchage: Pour avoir regardé une blanche, un noir est pendu..." Ce soir, 11-12 janvier, 1953. [Return to text]

22. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, in Paris BNF, "Arts et Spectacles," Section Richelieu, a printout of a clipping with no mention of journal or date. The BNF holds a collection of clippings with photographs of Dunham's shows in Paris. Most of the reviews quoted in this essay are from these holdings. [Return to text]

23. They were falsely accused of rape by two white women: "messing white women /snake lyin' tale /dat hang and burn /jail with no bail." Quoted in Kaiso, p. 495. [Return to text]

24. Françoise Giroud, Nouveaux Portraits, Gallimard, 1964. [Return to text]

25. Interview with Gwen Mazer, Essence, December 1976, in Kaiso, p. 421. [Return to text]

26. "Notes on Dance," in Seven Arts, 1954, in Kaiso, p. 496. [Return to text]

27. "La Boule Blanche," Esquire, September 1939, in Kaiso, p. 497. [Return to text]

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