One-Woman Revolution Katherine Dunham

Dance Magazine, August, 2000 by Wendy Perron

Asked about her courageous stand, Dunham says simply, "You can't learn or acquire these things; I think they're just put in you from the beginning."

She is very happy about the Dunham Institute, to be held in August (see sidebar). She feels it is an extension of her destiny to teach--"My guiding voices tell me I should teach, and that's what I've been doing my entire life." The Dunham technique is being taught all over the country. McBroom-Manno, who has taught Dunham technique at Adelphi University, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center, and now at the Ninety-Second Street Y DanceCenter in New York, says, "I teach Dunham technique as a way of life. Nutrition, African-based religions and social conscience are all part of it." Walter Nicks and Romero, who has taught dance history at the Ailey center, keep the Dunham technique alive in Europe, while McBroom-Manno passes it along in the United States.

"Everybody is an anthropologist," Dunham says. "My objective is to see that different cultures get to know each other." McBroom-Manno relates how, as a scholarship student getting free lunch at the school, she was required to learn the traditional Japanese tea ceremony. "We would be squirming and carrying on, but she wanted us to learn the serenity and silence of that tradition." In preparing for Aida (1963), McBroom-Manno and the rest of the cast, dancers from both Dunham's group and the Metropolitan Opera ballet company, studied karate at the Dunham school to perfect a processional before the African king.

Her influence is global. She helped to train the Senegalese National Ballet, and her performances inspired the start of many national groups, such as Ballet Folklorico de Mexico. Her numerous awards include the Dance Magazine Award in 1968, the Kennedy Center Honors, the American Dance Festival Scripps Award, the Albert Schweitzer Award and, just this spring, the Duke Ellington Award.

She is still concerned about Haiti. During a May 25 interview, she was gratified to hear that very day that Haiti had held free elections without incident.

But her thoughts linger on the art of dance. "Dance has been the stepchild of the arts for a long time. I think now it's time for it to take its place among the other arts."

It is also time for Katherine Dunham to be honored as one of the great innovators in the field of dance and one of the great humanitarian artists in history.

RELATED ARTICLE: Instituting Dunham

BY K.C. PATRICK

FOR SEVENTEEN summers, Katherine Dunham has conducted an institute in St. Louis, Missouri (across from East St. Louis, Illinois, where she has a home), to teach the Dunham technique to eager dancers. This year, though, when Jannas Zalesky learned that Dunham would be in New York for an extended stay, she conceived the idea of sponsoring a Dunham Institute at City Center August 12-18. Zalesky is head of City Center's Outreach Education Department, which arranges training and resources for dance educators and artists teaching in New York's enormous school system. Directed by Judith Dakin, City Center is not only an award-winning performance venue and home to major professional dance companies but also a major player in linking schoolchildren to the arts, providing arts training to their teachers, and engaging professional artists to share their expertise in schools. City Center also works closely with agencies such as Career Transitions for Dancers.