The mixture of dance and song and anthropology, with a firm accent on sex, that struck a new note in the dance theatre, hailed from Chicago. Her name is Katherine Dunham. She is a dynamo of energy; she is elusive; she is unpredictable. She is a quite superb combination of exoticism and intellectuality. Daughter of a French-Canadian and an American Negro, Katherine was born in Joliet, Illinois, in 1914. Her theatrical experience has ranged from art museums to night clubs, from Broadway to London’s West End, to the _Théâtre des Champs Elysées_ in Paris, to European triumphs. Her early life was spent and her first dancing was done in Chicago. She flashed across the American entertainment world comet-like. More recently she has confined her activities almost exclusively to England and Europe. I had no part in her beginnings. By the time I undertook to manage her, she had assembled her own company of Negro dancers and had oscillated between the rarefied atmosphere of women’s clubs and concert halls, on the one hand, to night clubs and road houses, on the other. The atmosphere of the latter was both smoky and rowdy. Katherine Dunham, I suspect, is something of a split personality, so far as her art is concerned. Possessor of a fine mind, it would seem to have been one frequently in turmoil. On the one side, there is a keen intellectual side to it, evidenced by both a Bachelor of Philosophy and a Master of Arts degree from the University of Chicago, two Rosenwald Fellowships, and a Rockefeller Fellowship. Her Masters degree is in anthropology. These studies she pursued, as I have said, on the one hand. On the other, she studied and practiced the dance with an equal fierceness. Her intellectual pursuits have been concerned, for the most part, with anthropological researches into the Negro dance. Her first choreographic venture was her collaboration with Ruth Page, in Chicago, in _La Guiablesse_, a ballet on a Martinique theme, with a score based on Martinique folk melodies by the American composer, William Grant Still, a work with an all-Negro cast, seen both at the Century of Progress Exhibition and the Chicago Opera House, in 1933. Dunham became active in the Federal Dance Theatre, and its Chicago director. It was when she was doing the dances for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union depression-time revue, _Pins and Needles_, that she tried a Sunday dance concert in New York at the Forty-eighth Street Theatre. So successful was it that it was repeated every Sunday for three months.