The first lady of Caribbean cadences.

• Author: Durbin, Paula
• Position: Dancer Katherine Dunham

Inspired by the African diaspora in the Caribbean, Katherine Dunham spearheaded an American dance revolution, breaking down social barriers and prejudice

The pulse of Africa is the pulse of most dance in the Americas. From Bahia to Baltimore, it throbs in rituals, rock, and, thanks to the creative intuition of Katherine Dunham, in a fabulous repertoire of contemporary ballet, modern dance, and jazz choreographics.

Dunham has been called the high priestess of black dance, its Martha Graham, its Marian Anderson. These designations may be well-meant, but they fail to do her justice because her legacy belongs to us all. Powerful African polyrhythms shape the music of every country party to the slave trade, and it was Dunham who showed us how to move in cadence. The New York Times critic John Martin once wrote that every Broadway and Hollywood musical is in her debt; the late Agnes de Mille added herself, Jerome Robbins, George Balanchine, and other classical ballet revolutionaries to the list of the beholden.

Both a ballerina and a social activist extraordinaire, Dunham has survived the indignities of segregation and the irreverence of the 1960s with her honorific intact. As befits a reigning diva, she is, even to her own family, Miss Dunham, a title she appears to prefer to all others she has earned. Her achievements in dance and human rights have been celebrated with twenty-one honorary degrees in law, the arts and the humanities, and numerous medals which, on formal occasions, cascade resplendent down her dress. She has been decorated with the Order of the Southern Cross of Brazil, the Albert Schweitzer Award, UNESCO's Gold Medal for Dance, a Kennedy Center Honor for Lifetime Achievement, the Scripps Award from the American Dance Festival, and an NAACP Image Award.

She is also a Knight, Commander, and Grand Officer of the Haitian Legion of Honor and Merit and an Honorary Citizen of Port-au-Prince. Haiti, in fact, has been at the core of Dunham's art and commitment ever since her fieldwork in the Caribbean as a candidate for a university degree in anthropology. "Haiti has nourished me for more than sixty years. I found every Caribbean island beautiful, but Haiti was the most beautiful of all," she explains. "It was also the first time I had seen a society unrestricted by racism. I was thrilled back then to be at the opening of the Senate, of course all black."

In a perverse way though, it was racism that led Dunham from Joliet, Illinois, to the Caribbean and then down the right career path. Dunham had enjoyed a middle-class, mostly unsegregated, Midwestern girlhood, so sheltered that her earLiest autobiography is entitled A Touch of Innocence (Harcourt-Brace, 1959), She was enrolled in ballet classes, an unheard of advantage for a black child in those days, and an activity in which she clearly excelled. Nothing, however, would open the door to the unapologetically Eurocentric world of mainstream American dance in the 1930s. Black dancers could strut in Josephine Baker's Paris revue Blackbirds, shuffle through minstrel shows, or hoof a little in vaudeville, but mainly they starved. So Dunham studied anthropology at the University of Chicago, where, on the advice of such legendary researchers as Franz Boas, Margaret Meade, and attorney-anthropologist Robert Redfield (who, decades later, in the trials preceding Brown v. Board of Education, would testify as Thurgood Marshall's unflappable expert on the fallacies of racial inferiority), Dunham...