Anthropology, Hot

Last Sunday night Manhattan's Windsor Theatre broke the Sabbath with a great scalawaggery of shimmying, shagging, rowdy flashing of black eyes and brown legs, a lively wigwagging of rumps. A comely Negro girl led the terpsichorean rout, rumbaing, impersonating Inca and Martinique maids, flaunting a big cigar in her mouth as a West Indian on an excursion, shimmying in a Florida barrel house, cakewalking as "de Tah Baby" in a ballet on Bre'r Rabbit. This live-wire dancer was Katherine Dunham, young Chicagoan, starting a series of Manhattan recitals with the best Negro dance group yet assembled.

At the University of Chicago, decade ago, Katherine Dunham majored in anthropology, with her eye on the dance as a primitive social manifestation. On the side she taught dancing, formed dance groups. In 1936 Miss Dunham persuaded the Rosenwald Foundation to send her to the West Indies to study the dances of Jamaica, Haiti, Martinique, Trinidad. Un like most anthropologists, Miss Dunham could break down the shyness of her subjects by cutting expert capers. Awed Haitians were sure she had "a piece" of their native god. Conversing in English and French patois, she picked up many a trick step, including the Ag'ya, a Martinique fighting dance which she put on at Chicago's Federal Theatre two years ago.

Back at the University of Chicago, Miss Dunham took her B. A. degree, wrote a thesis on Haitian dances for her

M. A. She has not yet found time to take her M. A. finals. Unmarried, Miss Dunham spends twelve hours a day in the theatre, says her aim is: "To attain a status in the dance world that will give to the Negro dance student the courage really to study, and the reason to do so.

And to take our dance out of the burlesque--to make of it a more dignified art." Onlookers were not so sure it was dignified, but they were certain it was better than burlesque.

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