Now comes the irony of the situation. My representative, on visiting the theatre, saw that the stage boxes abutted the orchestra pit on the same level with it “Why not place the percussionists there?” he thought. He proposed this to the union official, and was informed that this would be permitted, “so long as there is a railing between the white players and the black.”
It was only later, on thumbing through the local telephone directory, my representative discovered there were two musicians’ locals there. One of them was listed with the word “colored” after it, in parenthesis.
Yes, we still have a long road ahead in the matter of fair employment practices and equal opportunities for all.
Having had a satisfying taste of the theatre, Miss Dunham eventually turned to it as her exclusive medium of expression, and branched out into a full-fledged theatre piece, with plot and all, called Carib Song, which, transmuted into Caribbean Rhapsody, proved more successful on the other side of the Atlantic than it did in the States.
My association with Katherine Dunham seemed to satisfy, at least for the moment, my taste for the exotic. I cannot say it added much to my knowledge of anthropology, but it broadened my experience of human nature.
I presented Katherine Dunham and her company in Buenos Aires and throughout South America during the season 1949-1950 when our association came to an end. In her artistic career Katherine Dunham has been greatly aided by the advice and by the practical help, in scenic and costume design, of her husband, the talented American painter and designer, John Pratt.
While the scope of Katherine Dunham’s dancing and choreography may be limited by her anthropological bias, she has a first-rate quality of showmanship. She has studied, revived, rearranged for the theatre primitive dances and creole dances, which are in that borderland that is somewhere at the meeting point of African and Western culture. Anthropology aside and for the moment forgotten, she is a striking entertainer.
F. AN AMERICAN GENIUS
It may well be that, considered as an individual, the American Martha Graham is one of the greatest dance celebrities in the United States. There are those who contend she is the greatest. She is certainly the most controversial. There seems to be no middle school of thought concerning her. One of them bursts forth with an enthusiasm amounting almost to idolatry. The other shouts its negatives quite as forcibly.
My first love and my greatest interest is ballet. However, that love and that interest do not obscure for me all other forms of dance, as my managerial career shows. Having presented prophets and disciples of what, for want of a more accurate term, is called the “free” dance, in the persons of Isadora Duncan and her “children” and Mary Wigman, I welcomed the opportunity to present the American High Priestess of the contemporary dance.