Katherine Dunham poster Le Bal Negré poster – 1949
This vintage theatre poster features Katherine Dunham. It wass created to promote the 1946 Bal Negré shows in New York. Like Josephine Baker twenty years earlier, Dunham was an American dancer. She was also a choreographer, author, educator and social activist. She has been called the “matriarch and queen mother of black dance.”
At the height of her career in the 1940s and 1950s, Dunham was renowned throughout Europe and Latin America and was widely popular in the United States. The Washington Post called her “dancer Katherine the Great”. For almost 30 years she maintained the Katherine Dunham Dance Company, the only self-supported American black dance troupe at that time. Over her long career, she choreographed more than ninety individual dances.[3] Dunham was an innovator in African-American modern dance as well as a leader in the field of dance anthropology.
Wikipedia tells us more:
“The Katherine Dunham Company, a troupe of dancers, singers, actors and musicians, was the first African-American modern dance company. Founded in Chicago, it grew out of Ballet Nègre, a student troupe founded in 1930 by Katherine Dunham (1909–2006), which later became the Negro Dance Group.
The company had successful runs on Broadway and in other major American cities. In a The New York Times review on February 19, 1940, dance critic John Martin wrote of Dunham: “Her performance with her group last Sunday at the Windsor Theatre may very well become a historic occasion, for certainly never before in all efforts of recent years to establish Negro dance as a serious medium has there been so convincing and authoritative an approach.”[
Beginning in the 1940s, Dunham took her troupe on a series of highly acclaimed world tours. The Dunham Company helped launch the career of many African-American performers of the day. Dunham alumni include Alvin Ailey, Rosalie King, Frances Davis, Eartha Kitt and Walter Nicks.
Dunham was a strong supporter of Social Activism. Her company toured throughout North America in the mid-1940s. She also performed in the racially segregated South, refusing to put on a show in one theater after finding out that the city’s black residents had not been allowed to buy tickets for the performance.
On another occasion, in October 1944, after getting a rousing standing ovation in Louisville, Kentucky, she told the all-white audience that she and her company would not return because “your management will not allow people like you to sit next to people like us.” She expressed a hope that time and the “war for tolerance and democracy” (WWII) would bring a change. One historian noted that “during the course of the tour, Dunham and the troupe had recurrent problems with racial discrimination, leading her to a posture of militancy which was to characterize her subsequent career.”
In Hollywood, Dunham refused to sign a lucrative studio contract when the producer said she would have to replace some of her darker-skinned company members. She and her company frequently had difficulties finding adequate accommodations while on tour because in many part of the country, black Americans were not allowed to stay at hotels.
While Dunham was recognized as “unofficially” representing American cultural life in her foreign tours, she was given very little assistance of any kind by the U.S. State Department. She had incurred the displeasure of departmental officials when her company performed Southland, a ballet that dramatized the lynching of a black man in the racist American South. Its premiere performance on December 9, 1950, at the Teatro Municipal in Santiago, Chile, generated considerable public interest in the early months of 1951. The State Department was dismayed by the negative view of American society that the ballet presented to foreign audiences. As a result, Dunham would experience some diplomatic “difficulties” on her future tours. The State Department regularly subsidised other less well-known groups, but it consistently refused to support her company (even when it was entertaining U.S. Army troops), although at the same time it did not hesitate to take credit for them as “unofficial artistic and cultural representatives.”
Successful revues featuring the company included the universally acclaimed 1946 production Bal Nègre. The show was billed as “A Native Music and Dance Revue in Three Acts and Six Scenes,” the show opened in New York in 1946 going on to perform fifty-four shows.
Our posters are carefully and professionally created from vintage originals. Whilst great care is taken in the production of these posters, we also try to maintain a vintage feel, so there may be small imperfections, fold marks, scuffs, tears or marks that were part of the original poster master. If these do appear they should be visible on the larger views of the item on this listing. The originals of many of the posters we offer can cost many thousands of pounds, so whilst these posters look great, especially framed and mounted on a wall, they are intended as a fun, affordable reproductions and not intended fine art prints.
The 50x70cm version has been specially produced to be used in conjunction with Ikea’s 50x70cm Ribba picture frame which currently retails for around £15. So you can bag a bargain of print and frame for a great price.
