A pioneer who had been sadly forgotten

Everybody honors Katherine Dunham, but nobody dances her.

When she died Sunday at age 96, this American dance pioneer had long since belonged to history -- as an anthropologist who adapted her field studies into vibrant dance spectacles, as a choreographer and company leader who brought audiences all over the world compelling visions of a life-affirming cultural heritage, as an influential, socially aware showbiz star intent on changing the country’s racist status quo.

There’s no shortage of people praising her -- especially now -- but also no announcements of Dunham pieces being added to anyone’s repertory. In an era when revivals and reconstructions reinvigorate the dance world, and the ownership of the late Martha Graham’s choreography inspires bitter legal battles, Dunham’s acclaimed body of work remains unknown to contemporary audiences -- and that’s not likely to change.

The reasons are complex, but they start with a widespread misunderstanding about the nature of her contribution to dance. Many historians try to make her fit into the pantheon of modern dance progenitors, alongside Isadora Duncan, Mary Wigman and Graham. But that’s a mistake. She moved in a very different arena: what we can call theatricalized folklore.

Her peers in this regard were Russia’s Igor Moiseyev (whose first folk adaptations date from almost exactly the same moment in the 1930s as Dunham’s) and Mexico’s Amalia Hernandez (who began much later).

All three of these artists were initially schooled in forms of theater dance and eventually became masters of choreographic stylization. All three developed techniques and training methods that made their large-scale companies distinctive and widely popular.

But Dunham didn’t enjoy the government subsidies that sustained Moiseyev and Hernandez, and her company couldn’t outlive her stardom. She moved on to a fruitful period in educational dance while the Moiseyev and Hernandez companies continued to flourish. So today there’s no cadre of trained interpreters to update her legacy, just vintage film and video clips documenting what’s been lost or forgotten.

Dunham’s work also arguably became the victim of a widening schism between her generation and those that followed. In her academic research, choreography and life as a priestess of the Vaudun religion, she made the Caribbean the center of her world. But as black American consciousness came to focus on Africa as the one and only motherland, her depictions of island folklore lost their primacy to the very audience that once needed her most and the dance companies serving that audience.

It’s everyone’s loss. More than 20 years ago, the Charles Moore Dance Theatre performed Dunham’s “Shango” as part of the Dance Black America festival in Brooklyn.

Looking at the film of that event and performance (issued on video by Dance Horizons), you find yourself caught up in a powerful ritual with links to ceremonies still practiced in Haiti, Trinidad and Cuba.

Based on years of observation, Dunham’s depictions of trance and possession take the piece way beyond cultural tourism into realms of experience that Western theater dance seldom invades, and the whole spectacle redefines our concept of spirituality as an active dialogue between parallel states of being.

Some of what you see might remind you of the hokey voodoo cliches that Hollywood exploited long before and after Dunham created this work in 1945, but “Shango” isn’t dated, hasn’t been superseded and might easily cast its spell on millennial audiences -- if there was a company skilled enough in her style to dance it persuasively.

There isn’t, so saying goodbye to Katherine Dunham is also inevitably saying goodbye to the possibility of that kind of company existing again. Not only are the realities of American arts subsidy incompatible with the scale of her theatricality, but there’s also a lingering prejudice against world dance among our cultural gatekeepers -- the same prejudice that makes people want to link Dunham with the early moderns because somehow she seems more important that way.

Don’t believe it. On the American landscape, Dunham was in a class by herself, the first real ambassador of inclusion in concert dance. With an unprecedented fusion of intelligence, dancing talent and personal radiance, she managed to make mass audiences look at black culture not only as something to enjoy but also as something to aspire to. Others have built on her accomplishments, but unless we can see her works again, danced as she intended, we’ll never fully appreciate the journey of exploration -- and conquest -- that her life represented.

Lewis Segal is The Times’ dance critic.