Josephine and Katherine got on well enough with each other. However, one eyewitness, Bobby Mitchell, noted the rivalry between the two when Dunham showed up at the Casino in Monte Carlo with the Aga Khan wearing “emeralds, earrings, necklace, bracelet matching. Then Josephine swept in…. She took one look at these emeralds, and sparks flew from her eyes. So she disappears into that hotel … And she comes down and she’s got those diamonds on … and she makes sure she sits next to Dunham at the table…. And Dunham sits back with that marvelous posture of hers and keeps adjusting the bloody emeralds.”1
On November 25, 1948, the Théâtre de Paris in Montmartre presented the French première of Dunham’s Caribbean Rhapsody. It was a gala performance, a benefit for a memorial to be dedicated to Gen. Philippe Leclerc in Brazzaville, French Equatorial Africa. A program note emphasized the piece’s aesthetic quality, as well as the cultural and intellectual approach to dance it exemplified: “the ability to go from emotion to orderly movement in which emotion is echoed and amplified.” Further, Dunham was praised for creating “a surprising alchemy which unites knowledge and instinct in a marvelous manner” (Aschenbrenner, 114). For the occasion, the theater imported jungle foliage, covering all its red velvet and gold-leaf walls with the foliage for an exotic effect. The performance was a triumph. Parisians celebrated Dunham as they had Baker. Clothes and fabric were designed inspired by John Pratt’s costumes and by the show in general. Artist Andre Quellier made sketches of the company, which were exhibited on their next tour. A sculptor had Dunham’s feet cast in bronze for display at the Musée de l’Homme. Parties were organized and attended by international celebrities. And while in Paris, Dunham’s private life took a decisive turn—she adopted a child. She also started to paint.2 Amid all these activities, she was relentlessly rehearsing, taking notes between performances, stretching to cover the costs of touring while at the same time insisting on having all the artistic and technical assistance she needed, regardless of cost.
On December 10, 1948, Voir magazine boasted a portrait of Dunham on its cover; the review by Jean Louis Chardans was characteristically titled “Danseuse es-sciences.” It emphasized Dunham’s learned approach to dance but began with a reference to Baker: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.3 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.'”
- Beckford, 107-8. [↩]
- Her pictorial works were exhibited in many countries as she toured and are now in the East St. Louis Museum. [↩]
- “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.” [↩]
