Topics for Today - February 8, 2007 Focus on Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus - Breakthrough Artists Katherine Dunham (1909 - ) Pearl Primus (1919 - 1994)

Topics for Today - February 8, 2007

• Focus on Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus - Breakthrough Artists

• Katherine Dunham (1909 - )

• Pearl Primus (1919 - 1994)

• Images opens tonight - Thurs - Sat 8 PM, Sun 2 PM

Katherine Dunham

Anthropologist and dancer - combines higer education and a performing career - challenges minstrel myth of the “uneducated Negro”

Bridges the 1st and 2nd phase of Black concert dance

Katherine Dunham – Anthropologist and Dancer

• Dunham draws on multiple traditions to develop her aesthetic- classical ballet, modern dance influences of Mary Wigman and the dances of the African diaspora both in the US and the Caribbean. She also had a Masters degree Anthropology from Northwestern University.

• African American concert dancers had another focus besides personal expression – needed to address the minstrel stereotypical myths about the Negro, and the myth that their was no African culture.

• Katherine Dunham’s work, along with Edna Guy and Pearl Primus focused on both African diaspora culture - Rites of Passage falls in this category and contemporary African American culture with that addressed the quest for liberty or expression of the lack of it.

Origins

Chicago – father black, mother white a principle in HS

When mother dies, father is shunned by family, raised by a black stepmother

Studied anthropology Univ. of Chicago with Melvin Herskovitz


• Katherine Dunham – started a Negro Dance Troupe which appeared in La Guiablesse in Chicago choreographed by Ruth Page. She meets anthropologist Dr. Redfield which sparks her interest in researching and uplifting respect for black dance.

• This peaked her interest to study.

• An early theorist of black dance.

• She went to Haiti on a Rosenwald fellowship to study the authentic dances, some of which revolved around the Vaudun rituals.


• She studied ballet and Mary Wigman modern technique. She also appeared on Broadway, and had a dance company that toured America, Europe, and Africa.

• Her company and Alvin Ailey - the most seen modern troupes around the world.

• She theatricalized the authentic ritual dances she studied for the stage and reviews.

Caribbean research in mid 30’s

Martinique, Jamaica and Haiti

Becomes a devotee of vaudun

Martinique - L’Agya - martial art disguised as a dance

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are needed to see this picture.

Research and Concert Dance Fusion

Brings this research back to concert dance - L’Agya is the first exdample - in Chicago

Early concerts in Chicago and then New York

Important Dances - a selected list

L’Agya (Martinique Fighting dance)

Stormy Weather - 1942 film, background of race riots in US

Shango - Caribbean sacred dance, possession

Barrel House Blues -- Jazz and blues dancing

Southland – depicts a lynching

Katherine Dunham – Anthropologist

• Katherine Dunham’s greatest contribution was her authentic research into the dances of Haiti and other Caribbean cultures and bring that research back to United States.

• She felt that these cultures were closer to African origins in dance culture because the influence of the dominant culture in the Caribbean was less pervasive and repressive.

• The Catholic religion of the Spanish rulers saw the original slaves as souls to be saved rather than sub-human as in the English colonies.

Shango from Carib Song- a theatrical version of ritual possession - modeled on Voodoo



Katherine Dunham – African and African American dance

• Dance in Africa functions as a continuum between community participation, individual virtuoso performance and the vehicle for spiritual practice.

• Dunham distinguished 3 processes involving African background in New World Dance

• Incorporation of African religions in Christian rites

• Secularization of African religious dancer.

• Interaction of African secular dances.

Stormy Weather - 1943 film Dance is the break in jazz ballad by Lena Horne



Barrel House Blues - a jazz/blues dance - address Afro- American contemporary

experience



Katherine Dunham – Sally Banes on Dunham and Rites of Passage

• Rites based on primal cultures yet still an “imagined” dance. Dunham’s work reflected her research.

• Community is supportive, positive and involved instead of antagonistic. In this sacred rite women are influential leaders – the matriarch of female elder initiates the ceremony.

• In her research in Haiti Duncan had special access because she was a women and of color (white mother and black father). She was a participant observer in women centered activities different from many white male anthropologists. –As a dancer she could participate in the many religious and secular activities that included dancing. She was the ultimate insider outsider.

Katherine Dunham – Rites of Passage (1941)

• In her Boston Tropical Review show that included many dances of African American sources among others only Rites was banned in Boston.

• Four sections – Puberty, Fertility Ritual, Death and Women’s Mysteries.

• Puberty addresses a boy’s transition to manhood. Death focuses on the chief’s funeral attended buy his multiple wives. Fertility Ritual addresses the community necessity of human procreation. Overseen by the Matriarch.

• Focuses on one couple the suggestion is that other couples are the focus on another day as all will experience this important transition.


• The dance simulates copulation in the gradual crescendo of excitement that occurs in the dance. It incorporates frank pelvic movements as part of the choreographic dialogue.

• While the key dancing duet begins the action it spreads to the community who echo the movement until ultimately the man lift s the women upwards in a lift at the back platform.

• This echoes the final lift of The Chosen One in Rite of Spring. Except here it is two very alive humans celebrating this important and spiritual function as opposed to the male elders offering up a dead maiden.

Katherine Dunham – Rites of Passage (1941) - Puberty




• This frank portrayal of sexuality was too much for those of more Puritan persuasion. Dunham commented that her dances were always seen as art in Europe and never as sexual.

• Dunham shared with Ruth St. Denis the presentation of exotic material on the US concert stage. She both embodied her dual persona of scholar and torrid dancer. She appropriated male symbols of power with her “Woman with a Cigar role in Tropical Review.

• Presented her dances from a scholarly perspective yet they were still highly entertaining. This perplexed reviewers. Therefore she features her intelligence – doubly critical as an African American because of the minstrel stereotypes that suggested blacks could not be educated.

Philosophy and Technique

Ballet fused with Afro-Haitian and Modern techniques

Challenges stereotypes - Afro-Americans need dance training to maximize their talent just like white dancers. Ballet just as important as ethnic forms.

Acculturation not race accounts for Afro-American rhythmic prowess

St Louis School

Katherine Dunham – Inovator in technique

• Created her own technique to train dancers to move in the Africanist style -polyrhythmic pelvic/body isolations blended with ballet and modern dance.

• At a time when critics felt blacks were unsuited to ballet and stated that dance training would hurt the “natural” rhythm of black dancers – Dunham rejected both of these stereotypical notions.

Dunham Technique



Katherine Dunham – Intellectual and African Philosophy

• Dance serves as a vehicle for self-awareness, of inner motivations. This is especially relevant for African American culture that was stripped of the connection to its culture, therefore allowing it to rediscovery itself through the dance and creative opportunities.

• Other modern dancers connected to a rich tradition of ideas - Laban/Wigman, Duncan and Greeks, Graham/Jung.

• Dunham connects to the African philosophy and African cultures. Her efforts seen through the lens of racism in America. Dunham’s technique iscomprehensive.


• The Dunham technique blended Western forms of ballet and modern – major influence was the Wigman or German modern dance tradition through a teacher in Chicago.

• She then translated many aspects of these African diaspora cultures to the stage – rendering ritual ceremonies theatrically convincing outside of their authentic spaces.

• Part of this included a frank presentation of human sexuality as good, healthy, pleasurable and spiritual – in the African tradition, rather than prurient or erotic.

Katherine Dunham

• She had a successful, happy marriage to John Pratt, a designer. He served her career and company.

• Dunham also politically brave in refusing to perform in theatres that were not fully integrated. With her integrated company which toured the world.

• She later defied the US State Dept. by performing a depiction of a lynching in Southland when touring in Argentina. – Her integrated company was concerned. She forged ahead. US

govt. put barriers to her future international travel.

• She portrayed women as a sexual being with dignity “acknowledging sexuality as part and parcel of biological, social and ritual life.

St. Louis School



Pearl Primus

Anthropoligist and dance

Bridges the 1st and 2nd phase of Black concert dance

Origins

Born in Tinidad, Grows up in NYC

Attends Hunter College HS and later Hunter College to study medicine in NYC

Dance origins – New Dance Group

Integrated, political and supportive

Studies with members of Martha Graham’s company

Solo dances immediately draw attention

Dunham and Primusshared burden of challenging racial inequality



Research – authentic experience

Lives in Southern US for about six months 1944

Late 40’s - travels to West Africa

Later work celebrates African dance, philosophy and Afro-American connection

Research – Southern travels 1944



Key Dances – political statements in 40’s – fight for freedom

Negro Speaks of Rivers – Langston Hughes poem

Strange Fruit – Lewis Allen poem

Hard Times Blues

African Ceremonial

Pearl Primus Early

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H.264 decompressorare needed to see this picture.

Pearl Primus - Hard Times Blues 1943

Pearl Primus Identity – Both Negro and Modern Dancer

These categories in conflict

Her dark skin and fleshy body mark her racial identity

Authenticity in representing Afro- American suffering

Her training marks her within the modern tradition

Katherine Dunham – African and African American dance

• What shall the Negro Dance About?

• Question posed in 1933, Worker’s Dance League at Harlem YMCA, following a performance by Hemsley Winfield.

• Why was this question even asked? Because they were pigeon holed by the minstrel stereotypes. Also due to the disconnection to original African culture - yet by 20th C most Negroes native born Americans.

• Answers that night, dance about what is vital to him, dance should express the strivings of the new Negro

Documents

Topics for Today - February 8, 2007 Focus on Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus - Breakthrough Artists Katherine Dunham (1909 - ) Pearl Primus (1919 - 1994)