On top of 'Mon pays et Paris' Josephine Baker has a third love, the astonishing Katherine Dunham, the tan general of a troupe of black dancers and musicians. Four evenings on end in a box of the Théâtre de Paris, Josephine has been jumping with enthusiasm ... in the company of Mistinguett, Edwige Feuillère, Jean-Paul Sartre, Armand Salacrou, and a few hundred greats of lesser importance.

Interestingly, the French audience saw the two stars as complementary, not rivals. On December 10, 1948, Regards magazine devoted its front cover to Dunham's "taking Paris to the Caribbean." Placing the review in context, Pierre Barlaier recalled La Revue Nègre as "the bush revised and corrected by Harlem." He wrote:

Rhapsodie Caraïbe, the show now presented by Katherine Dunham, is really something else.... A specialist of ethnographic studies, this young lady did not fear to go back to the sources. She wants to show to black people exiled in North America their true cultural bases and attempted to bring together blacks in the Caribbean or Latin America in order to reconstruct an authentic Negro style.

Barlaier praised the show as "magnificent with life, impudicity and rhythm," and proceeded to list the numbers that won the greatest applause.[7] He also used Baker to commend the revue: "Josephine Baker, the star of the initial 'Black Birds,' was herself, the other night, stunned with admiration. 'I am so proud, so proud,' she said, 'as though I was dancing.'"

French reactions were a characteristic blend of allusions to Dunham's erudition and to the sensuous attractions of the show. A piece by popular critic Max Favalelli can be read as an invitation au voyage[8] through Dunham's choreography, and tells us much about French fantasies about the black body in exotic settings—the colors, smells, and movements. Interpreting the show with his preconceived ideas, clichés, and contrived images, the reviewer trivializes the substance of the performance. Once again, the article opens with an evocation of the Revue Nègre. One is struck by the similarities in the comments on Baker's shows and on Dunham's:

Twenty years ago Harlem sent us like a blow to the heart the famous Revue Nègre, which revealed the magnificent ebony body of Josephine Baker, the gasping of the tom tom.... A distinguished anthropologist, Katherine Durham limits herself, in her human geography, to the shores of the Caribbean and Brazil. After the strong primitive alcohol from the alembics of New Orleans, she serves white (or cream colored) rum that disguises its fire under a deceitful sweetness. From Havana to Martinique via Trinidad, we set out on a lazy cruise on those seas of tepid milk surrounded by coral. An enormous cigar between her snow-white teeth, her hair shining like the flank of a sea lion, Katherine appears, like the Creole sung by Baudelaire. Her legs, supple and naked, are ivory pistils that emerge from the corolla of her petticoats."[9]

But the strangest scene for the critic was "L'Ag'Ya," and this is how he describes, in his own fashion, one of Dunham's most famous dances. "Slowly, with the gestures of a sleepwalker, she begins to undress. First, her shimmering headdress. Then her skirt reveals lascivious hips shaken by a voluptuous tremor." And he describes the majumba, the love dance induced by an evil philter, after the beguin danced by the Creole women: "Leaning back in disarray, Katherine faints ... the blue steel of a knife will free her from the charm. But the audience finds it hard to break free from the charm of Katherine."

Caribbean Rhapsody was described as a tumulte noir. An article in Ce soir (27 November 1948) offered Dunham one the best compliments she could hope to find in the press: "It is such a revelation in technique and richness that it can be compared to Diaghilev's ballets." In other reviews, Dunham, la magicienne de la danse antillaise, was compared to Carmen Anaya, la reine gitane, whom, incidentally, both Baker and Dunham greatly admired. In a "Letter from England," Maurice Pourchet praised Dunham for her magnificent performance in "L'Ag'hia." But he was particularly impressed with the male actors, who, he said, could give lessons to Western professional performers, and whose merits emerge out of racial instinct—a compliment that must have made Dunham shudder since she put so much emphasis on training, work, and discipline. Mention was also made of the excellent use of the drum—so perfectly played that its "sonority [took] on definite colorations" of "jazz more refined than the barrelhouse or nightclub jazz" of Dunham's voice; not as striking as Baker's or Robeson's, but with "timbres" that express nostalgia."[10] Some reviews gave detailed description of the show, usually—as often was the case with Dunham—organized in three parts: one inspired by traditions from South America, mainly Brazil; the second a ballet set in the West Indies; the third, a retrospective of jazz and an evocation of Harlem and Chicago in the mid-1920s. One critic in Carrefour was particularly severe, denouncing the entire performance as a ballet nègre blanc whose modernity was already outmoded in the States. He further claimed that the enthusiastic acclaim of Parisians was as outmoded as the show. Most reviews mentioned the fact the Dunham had studied anthropology; one marveled at the idea that such a superb dancer could also be a distinguished anthropologist. Hélène Jourdan Morhange gave perhaps the most flattering appreciation. Quoting Nietzsche's phrase, "Rhythm is an indispensable self-conquest through discipline," she praised the "hallucinating spectacle," but also maintained, "the reckless fantasy that Dunham presents is always based on rigorous discipline." She also singled out Tommy Gomez and Vanoye Aikens for their skills as dancers.[11]

After its premiere at the Théâtre de Paris in November 1948, Rhapsodie Caraïbe ran at the Sarah Bernard. Seeing the show in February 1949, J.A. Baltus was impressed by the striking innovation Dunham brought to the stage: "the perfect ensemble she creates with dancers and musicians, the subtleties of sets, lights, and designs, and the variety of the numbers, burlesque or solemn, Dunham's ability to shift from one mood or tone to another, to shift scenes.... With her, exoticism makes sense."[12] When a slightly different version of Dunham's show was performed in July 1949 at the Ambassadeurs, Richard Wright and Aimé Césaire were the sponsors. To Anne Masson, the show was "a vast panorama of the arts and spectacles of the Negro race that asserts its bi-continental dimension, its complicity and its unity at the same time. It is the world of a marvelously gifted people for whom heartbeats are expressed in the rhythms of dances and sadness."[13] In February and March 1950 and October 1951, the Théâtre de Chaillot, and then the Théâtre de Paris, featured new versions of Rhapsody, the latter with the additional numbers "Frevo" and "Washerwoman." In January 1953, Dunham presented her last big show, Southland. In 1955 she directed a musical comedy, Les Deux Anges, at the Théâtre de Paris.

Thus, from 1948 to 1955, and in between tours to distant places, Dunham returned repeatedly to Paris with revised versions of her Rhapsody or with new choreographies. The first part of the show was called "Africa." Its prologue was a Brazilian suite that included "Acaraje," a homage to the Brazilian musician Dorival Caymmi; "Choros," an arrangement of a quadrille of old Brazil; "Frevo," on a carnival tune from Pernambuco, Brazil; "Batucada," from the Bahia region; and "Los Indios," "Cumbia," "Tango," and "Shango," a set of ritual dances ending in a sacrifice to the Yoruba god. The second part, called "Americana," included plantation dances like the buck and wing, the pas mala, and the juba, as well as spirituals like the barrelhouse, some nostalgic melodies, and the cakewalk, which started with acrobatics featuring Mister Bone and Tambo. The third part began with "Rites of Passage" and included rituals of male puberty; "Death," a set of orphic rites with the god Gédé presiding; and "Veracruzana," derived from Mexican folklore.[14] Dunham not only made a careful selection of her best numbers for this show but also followed the trail of the black diaspora. She had set out to perform with geographical and historical coherence. Where Josephine often seemed to improvise on someone else's music, Katherine largely followed traditional steps on ancient tunes especially arranged for her company. The choreography thus created was a strong thematic and artistic statement.[15] If most critics were tempted to see Dunham as a new Baker, as another fille de la jungle who had brought exoticism and primitivism to the Paris stage, and if many used the same clichés about black dance and the black body, they nonetheless tried to give Dunham her due. They appreciated her singular itinerary, her ability to do thorough research and cover so much ground, to stage innovative choreographies, perform, create a school, and train dancers.[16]

Among Dunham's choreographies, Southland deserves special attention. Like Baker, Dunham had always been concerned with any form of discrimination, in particular with the pervasive violent racism against American blacks.[17] Dunham knew intimately the poem "Strange Fruit" by Lewis Allan, a pseudonym of Abel Meeropol, and also Lillian Smith's novel of the same name (Kaiso, 361) and since 1949 she had been working on a "lynching ballet," an original piece that would turn out to be her most controversial show. She was convinced that dance should not be mere entertainment, that dance could be art and yet express the rage and terror of a lynching. Given the political climate in the U.S. in the early 1950s, with McCarthyism in full swing, only a few writers, intellectuals, and artists were courageous enough to take a public stand, even against egregious injustices, and only a few dared confront political issues in their work. It is significant, then, that Dunham conceived of the work while she was on her South American and European tours. She certainly may have had in mind the experiences of Richard Wright and Paul Robeson when she chose to premiere Southland abroad.

The show was commissioned by the Symphony Theater of Chile, el teatro municipal. In Santiago, censure came fast and was no surprise.[18] The ballet was accused of being an act of defiance and disloyalty, and was almost immediately canceled. The company was forced to leave, and reviewers were silenced by the U.S. Embassy. Performances planned for Buenos Aires for the 1951-1952 season were canceled. In spite of all these difficulties, financial problems, and warnings from her company, Dunham would not be deterred, as though staging her ballet against all odds had become a moral obligation.[19] She had completed and choreographed Southland during her stay in Buenos Aires in the last months of 1949. Rehearsals were resumed in Genoa, Italy, in preparation for the Paris season. Roberto Rossellini saw one rehearsal and was enthusiastic. Dunham informed the American Embassy in Paris of her intention to present Southland there, and the cultural attaché's evasive answer was, "We trust your good taste." Dunham thought that if he would not commit himself to prohibit the show, she would go ahead and do it.

Southland opened at the Palais de Chaillot on January 9, 1953. The variety of the steps, the musical score, the songs—sorrow and mourning and healing songs—and the elaborate sets and costumes created an ensemble of impressive sophistication and beauty. Two contradictory aspects of the South, its obvious magnificence and its singular violence, were symbolized by a magnolia tree with blood on its bark. Skillfully weaving graphic description together with dramatic movement and gesture, Dunham was careful to include many of her successful choreographies as a long prelude, gradually picking up the thread of violence. Ultimately, the piece arrived at the famous "Habanera," performed by a white woman, and the dance of death, which concluded with a lynched black body hanging from the tree, accompanied by the song "Strange Fruit."

The Parisian press made up for the absence of reviews in Santiago, where the press had been informed that all newsprint would be withdrawn should anyone venture to write about Southland. In France, reviewers besieged Dunham before and after the show. It was not only the acclaimed dancer whom they pressed with questions, but also the woman who had dared to challenge the authorities of several countries. Bringing to Paris a ballet that had created such a stir was a sensation. Paris would be the definite step in the unfolding of the Southland story, but perhaps also in Dunham's and her company's career. The press met the event with the usual attention, yet the reviews of the show itself were mixed, some expressing praise, surprise, or disappointment that a talented choreographer should venture onto such tricky ground. Le Monde regretted that Dunham had changed "since those wonderful evenings" and asked, "What has happened to the anthropologist we once admired?"[20] Journalists[21] and audiences had definitely forged their own image of what Dunham's appearances should be like and were not ready to follow her new experiences. Some blamed her for betraying her original talent and her racial heritage by using a sort of Greek chorus and orchestral music instead of "primitive" Negro tunes. Others criticized her for being too classical, too cerebral; others applauded her for "going beyond the folkloric and anecdotal into the realism of classicism." Still others thought she was too timid in expressing anger and in showing the violence endured by blacks. Paris Presse refused to even mention Southland. Radio commentators blamed Dunham for showing the actual hanging on stage.

Offended and upset by the critics, Dunham felt suddenly estranged from the audiences who had met her earlier work with enthusiasm. Even her longtime friend Bernard Berenson, who saw Southland in Paris, joined the chorus of disapproval, thus expressing what might have been the American response. Aggrieved by judgments in which she sensed "the repeated rhythm of an out-of-gear machinery," she had responded to French critics in 1949 with an article titled "Je suis toujours moi meme," explaining that novelties were the result of her constant observation of the world around her and of the urge she felt to introduce her impressions "without betraying the quality of her artistic message."[22] She claimed that with Southland she was renewing a constant theme in her work: calling for liberty, democracy, and justice, as she did when she dedicated a show to the cause of the Spanish Civil War, or when in 1937 she presented her "Tropic Death," with Talley Beatty as a fugitive from a lynch mob.[23]

Katherine Dunham's ballets had much appeal for the French, although she did not attract the crowds Josephine Baker did. Dunham's French audiences were more enlightened about the racial situation than they had been in 1925. The translations of Richard Wright's works had seen to this. But the appeal of Dunham came as much from erotic exoticism as from a genuine perception of her cultural authenticity and the originality of her choreography. As journalist and novelist Françoise Giroud put it: "Mme Dunham creates a huge misunderstanding. For us, Katherine Dunham is a star like any other star. But she sees herself differently. She sees herself as an anthropologist. She believed that she would die of shame when in 1948 it was said that her ballets were sexy. In fact, we are bound to say that her success, in Paris as well as in New York, owes far less to her scientific demonstrations than to the violent eroticism that emanates from her show."[24] It was precisely this image of her performances to which Dunham objected. It is perhaps in her own words on dance that one can find an explanation of the nature of this misunderstanding with her audiences.

Being on the stage for me was making love. It was my expression of my love for humanity and things of beauty. This is what took Europe by storm. Initially I was embarrassed by discussions about sexuality and my legs. I did not realize that sexuality was a dominating factor in my life.... For me the greatest part of performing was the intensity of meeting the challenge of different situations, locations and people. Mistaken or not, I felt also I had to carry on part of my intellectual life while performing.[25]

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]