Haiti dances to a different drummer: a country in turmoil turns to ancient folk religion, with rich results for dance - includes article on dancer Katherine Dunham's continuing dance and political activities

Dance Magazine, August, 1994 by Elizabeth Barad

Dunham also includes the writhing motions of Damballah, the god of fertility whose symbol is the snake, in her technique. (She used these movements in her choreography for the Metropolitan Opera's 1963 production of Aida.) At a ceremony I attended, Beauvoir, who officiated, appeared to by possessed by this god as he crawled flat on his stomach on the ground of the temple. Afterward, Beauvoir, a trained biochemist, said that Damballah's earthbound movements represent the essence of life--"what scientists call the DNA."

"But," he continues, "all of the ceremonial dances are the essence of our religious life." They are also at the core of the political history of Haiti.

KATHERINE DUNHAM

World-renowned dancer, choreographer, anthropologist, and writer, Katherine Dunham acknowledges that she is a mambo (a voudon priestess) and uses steps from voudon ceremonies in her choreography and technique. "To really know Haiti, I had to belong and be formally initiated into the religion," Dunham said in her deep and vibrant voice, when interviewed at her elegant home in the slums of Port-au-Prince. She has gone through eight initiations as a priestess, three of which involved walking through fire. Dunham called them "some of my honorary degrees"--of which she has many, including a Kennedy Center Honors Award in 1983. Dunham showed me her peristyle (temple), where she had presided over numerous ceremonies. It was decorated with the symbols of the voudon gods and was only a few feet away from the main house.

Since that interview, Dunham's home in Haiti has been burned to the ground, reportedly by peasants who knew of her support for the infamous dictator, Dr. Francois Duvalier. Dunham, however, says that her allegiance to that despot was solely for the purpose of gaining sponsorship for a national dance company. Lacking a Haitian troupe to showcase the power of religious voudon steps, Dunham highlighted them in her own choreography. She also documented the various ritual movements in her book Dances in haiti, the authoritative work on the subject, and wrote about voudon in Island Possessed (1969), which was issued in paperback this summer.

Although Haiti has been her home for forty-five years, Dunham, now eighty-four, says show won't return until the present military regime is ousted. To protest the situation in the country that she loves, she went on a hunger strike to support the Reverend Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the first freely elected Haitian president, who was overthrown by a military coup [see May 1992, page 14]. Only Aristide's personal intervention dissuaded her from continuing her fast.

But Dunham continued to speak at protest rallies in the ousted president's behalf and to teach her technique at the Katherine Dunham Centers for the Arts and Humanities in East St. Louis, Illinois. Ever-busy despite a surgically replaced knee, Dunham also supervises a children's workshop, which trains disadvantaged children in dance. Somehow she finds time to work on a book, tentatively titled Mine Field, which will chronicle her life and her efforts to keep a dance company alive. And, hopeful that the repressive Haitian government will change, Dunham is planning to start a film school upon her return to the country which has so inspired her art and her political activism.