(Read Part I here)

In addition, Dunham’s students, such as Lavinia Williams, later exerted a tremendous influence on Haitian dance by teaching formal technique in Haiti. Williams, invited by Estimé’s successor, Paul Magloire, was trained in classical technique and used her training to categorize and professionalize Haitian folkloric dance. Williams added floor stretches, body conditioning, ballet training, and choreography classes.[30] This made folkloric dance, though still rooted in peasant and Vodou dance and style, even more applicable for promotion of Haiti internationally and for tourism. Indeed, Williams hosted her own radio show in the 1950s to support Haitian tourism. However, she also, like Dunham, ensured her students studied the origins of each dance they performed so that they could identify rhythms and understand their social meaning.[31] Jean-Léon Destiné, who entered Haitian folkloric performance through Blanchet’s group, also performed under Dunham. Destiné, like Williams, professionalized Haitian dance, and starred in the “Shango” sequence of Dunham’s Bal Nègre.[32] He also exemplified another trend of folkloric performance, the stylization and professionalization which made it easier for the Haitian middle-classes to identify with without disavowing their bourgeois or European-influenced standards of performance.[33] The desacralized Vodou dances further facilitated Haitian elite and middle class consumption and support by removing folkloric dance from its religious context  In other words, staged folklore performance became a specialized art that, despite drawing on the traditions of the Haitian peasantry, was appropriate for members of the upper and middle class. Destiné’s life in New York, associations with Harlem intellectuals such as Langston Hughes, and his own dance troupe in New York ensured Haitian influence would survive on African American dance troupes, complementing Dunham’s Pan-Africanist aesthetic she pioneered in the 1930s and 1940s.[34] Destiné, Williams, and others thereby cemented the association of folkloric performance with national identity and racial pride, which they inherited from Dunham’s adaptations of Haitian dance as a key node for negritude. 

Dunham’s technique and performances also reveal the significance of negritude in her ethnographic and theoretical works. Her thesis, later published as The Dances of Haiti, categorizes and analyzes every form of dance in Haiti, including the social, sacred, and marginal. Dunham highlights the importance of the sacred and secular dialectic in Haitian music, while also noting the influence of Cuban musical genres and Dominican merengue on Haitian social dance. The Haitian adaptation of contredanse adds other European and non-Haitian elements into Haitian dance. This acknowledges the influence of other Caribbean, African, and European cultures on Haitian dance, thereby avoiding the pitfalls of a romanticized peasantry that is authentically “African.”[35] For Dunham, nonetheless, Vodou permeated all Haitian dance due to its impact on peasant psychology and the role of dance in its ceremonies.[36] The congo, yanvalou, banda, petro, rara and other dances serve different social functions which lend coherence to Haitian peasant society, whether it be artistic expression, community solidarity, sexual, religious, or spiritual. In short, Haitian dances served a number of social and psychological purposes, and contained their own set of logic and categorization. The levels of sophistication, nuance, and community built into folkloric dance were a system worthy of study and performance in themselves. These dances, however, did not mean Dunham rejected other influences. Her fluid conception of black dance and Africanist aesthetics was not exclusive to other styles and recognized multidirectional waves of influence within the Caribbean and between the Caribbean and African Americans.

Like Zora Neale Hurston, Dunham recognized the prominence of the Caribbean as a bridge between the United States and Africa. Haitian dance and folklore served as a bridge for African Americans, supposedly deracinated, to reconnect with African cultural practices. Indeed, Dunham’s African American background facilitated her access to Vodou ceremonies and peasant homes. Perceived as a deracinated though familiar Other, her Haitian informants inquired about African Americans and their severed ties to the world of the ancestors.[37] Dunham additionally received more liberties in her participation in Vodou due to her “unofficial position as emissary of the lost black peoples from Nan Guinin.”[38] Because Haitians and other Caribbean people were able to retain more aspects of African religion than African-Americans, one can junderstand why Dunham and other African-Americans looked to Haiti, the Vodou religion, and folklore as a pathway to their African origins and aesthetics. Her canzo initiation in the faith, in addition to later initiations and relationships with priests and priestesses in the Vodou faith, even though she never experienced possession, allowed her to personally experience ritual dances. This gave her an understanding of how a move like the yanvalou is associated with release from emotional conflict by establishment of contact with a superior being, using fluid movement involving spine, base of the head, chest, solar plexus and pelvic girdle. Or how the zepaule, using regular forward and backward jerking of shoulders and rapid contracting and expanding of the chest, enhances self-hypnotism, autointoxication and borders on ecstasy.[39] Naturally, Dunham’s use of Haiti as a source of Africanity for African-Americans and her references to Caribbean peasants as primitives suggests the influence of Herskovits and Redfield. But, like Price-Mars and Estimé, she wanted Vodou and folklore to unite Haitians and contribute to modernization and economic development.

Dunham’s technique and performances exemplify her notion of negritude. Accordingly, she devised her technique from the steps of Caribbean folk dance, which she then filtered through classical ballet and other traditions. Her attachment to what she terms the collective in primitive folk society has had the most influence on her performances.[40] Her performance material similarly indicated the fundamental place of Haiti in her aesthetic canon. For example, Dunham had planned to perform a ballet based on Henri Christophe, the self-declared king of Haiti and a hero of the Haitian Revolution. This ballet also recognized the importance of the Vodou religion in uniting the Haitian rebels in defeating France. Although the ballet was never performed, one cannot help thinking of William Grant Still’s Troubled Island, an opera about the Haitian Revolution, another example of African American artists and intellectuals drawing on Haiti.[41] Clearly, Haiti loomed large in the minds of African American intellectuals and Dunham’s elevation of Haiti as a center for humanism that valorized blackness contributed to it. Her other works, such as Bal Nègre and its famous “Shango” sequence, named for the orisha of the Yoruba pantheon, features the serpentine movement of someone perhaps under the possession of Damballah. The women’s costumes in that work also honor the dress of Haitian women, fully incorporating the use of the dress to accentuate their twists and turns.[42] Her Africanist aesthetic also combined styles from Martinique, Cuba, and African American styles, but the basis of the Dunham Technique derives from the combination of yanvalou, petro, and congo paillette with modern dance and ballet steps.[43] The Dunham Technique resembles Dunham’s approach to Vodou and African-derived religious traditions. As Dunham explains in Island Possessed, her initiation into Vodou did not preclude serving gods or spirits of Cuba and Senegal, and she hoped to “bring some reconciliation into these wandering, jealous siblings of different nations but of the same ancestors.”[44] Thus, using Haitian foundations, the Dunham Technique transformed American dance and fostered African Diasporic art. She paved the way for the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s through an aesthetic that showed the world the beauty of Black Atlantic dance forms, rerouting and remixing different Diasporic communities to dance negritude.

Unsurprisingly, Dunham’s negritude humanism also shaped her social, gender and sexual politics. Negritude, as she previously mentioned in relation to Haitian president Estimé, was a humanism based in uplifting the impoverished masses of Haiti and asserting the dignity and beauty of the race. Traces of this can be found in Dunham’s approach to gender and sexuality. For instance, her dance company was a center for gay black life in Harlem during the 1940s.[45]Queerness, which could be expressed in Haitian Vodou, followed Dunham’s conception of negritude as a form of free expression. Further, she created a space for black sexual resistance through the yanvalou dance, which freed the pelvic girdle, drawing on Haitian and West African dance.[46] Dunham and her dancers embodied a radical shift in modern dance and ballet which showed Africanist aesthetics that liberated body movement, for male and female dancers. While one may criticize it for an eroticized portrayal of the black body, Dunham used modern ballet and the concert-stage to legitimize Africanist aesthetics as the equal of European tradition. In addition, Dunham’s gender shaped her dance anthropology and appreciation of negritude. As one of the first black woman anthropologists to study the Caribbean, she engaged in fieldwork on her own, transcended the class-color divisions within Haitian society, and befriended women from all social circles. Indeed, Dunham learned some Caribbean dance styles by befriending Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Haitian prostitutes in Port-au-Prince. These women, mostly Dominicans working at brothels like La Paloma Blanca, taught Dunham how to dance to the rumba, merengue, Haitian meringue, and bolero.[47] A pan-Caribbean sound emerged from this crossroads of musical genres and instrumentation, which Dunham observed in Haitian bamboche, or social dances. Clearly, gender and sexuality shaped Dunham’s danced negritude, which challenged conventional social relations and homophobia.

Ultimately, Dunham’s relationship to Haiti and Haitian folklore was a multifaceted relationship. Dunham perhaps betrayed a rather simplistic understanding of Haitian politics in her comparison of presidents Estimé, Magloire, and Duvalier to founding fathers Toussaint L’Ouverture, Henri Christophe, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines. She may have been guilty of a romanticized reading of the Haitian peasantry as the heart and soul of the Haitian people. However, Haiti provided a way to connect African Americans with Africa since Caribbean peoples were perceived as having stronger retention of shared African traditions and customs. Dunham’s ties to Herskovits, Redfield, Price-Mars, and Haitian political figures further shaped her affiliation to Haiti while her own unique standpoint as a woman anthropologist and dancer allowed her to develop a different conception of negritude that showcased Black Atlantic Dance as worthy of performance on the stage. Through her scholarly work, dance performances, and memoir, Island Possessed, one can see how Dunham’s development of a humanist conception of negritude embraced progressive social values that challenged Haitian class and color hierarchies while simultaneously creating an Africanist aesthetic for African American dancers. Her Africanist aesthetic was not opposed to the European ballet and modern dance tradition, but incorporated Haitian dance as a foundation while adding elements of African and other Caribbean traditions and dance folklore. This paved the way for future movements inspired by African, Afro-Caribbean, and African American traditions and styles without pursuing an essentialist notion of race and culture. This proved to be revolutionary in both Haiti and for black dancers all around the world influenced by Katherine Dunham. 

[30] Millery Polyné, From Douglass to Duvalier: U.S. African Americans, Haiti, and Pan Americanism, 1870-1964, 158.

[31] Ibid, 176.

[32] Ibid, 166.

[33] Lois E. Wilcken, “Staging Folklore in Haiti: Historical Perspectives,” Journal of Haitian Studies 1, no. 1 (1995): 108.

[34] Millery Polyné, From Douglass to Duvalier: U.S. African Americans, Haiti, and Pan Americanism, 1870-1964, 166.

[35] Katherine Dunham, Dances of Haiti (Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, 1983), 9.

[36] Ibid, 6.

[37] Katherine Dunham, Dances of Haiti, 15

[38] Ibid.

[39] Katherine Dunham, Dances of Haiti, 61.

[40] Katherine Dunham, “Open Letter to Black Theaters,” The Black Scholar 10, no. 10 (1979): 5.

[41] Joanna Dee Das, Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora, 50.

[42] Shango.” Library of Congress video. https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200003834/.

[43] Hannah Durkin, “Dance anthropology and the impact of 1930s Haiti on Katherine Dunham’s scientific and artistic consciousness,” 23.

[44] Katherine Dunham, Island Possessed, 272.

[45] Susan Manning, “Modern dance, Negro dance and Katherine Dunham,” Textual Practice 15, no. 3 (2001): 499.

[46] Katherine Dunham, Dances of Haiti, 61.

[47] Katherine Dunham, Island Possessed, 213.

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