Marie-Christine Dunham Pratt speaking with Dr. Robert R. Archibald. Photograph © 2008, Missouri History Museum.

The late, great Katherine Dunham played many roles in life: modern dance innovator, global activist, and anthropologist. A dance tour in Europe led her to another great role she’d play in life—mother. While performing in Paris in late 1948, Dunham met 18-month-old Marie-Christine, who was then living in a Catholic convent. Instantly smitten, Dunham married her lover, costume designer John Pratt, so that they could adopt young Marie-Christine.

Soon, Marie-Christine was traveling throughout Europe with her mother’s dance company. As Katherine Dunham’s career was at its apex, Marie-Christine attended boarding schools in Rome, Switzerland, and Paris, joining her parents on holidays and for vacations. Like her mother, Marie-Christine has a great affinity for the culture and people of Haiti.

In the summer of 2008, Marie-Christine Dunham Pratt traveled to St. Louis from her home in Rome, Italy, to consult with the Missouri History Museum for the exhibit “Katherine Dunham: Beyond the Dance.” She sat down with Dr. Robert R. Archibald, President of MHM, to discuss her childhood, travel, life with her famous mother and father, and her parents’ legacies.

This interview has been edited for publication.

...Talking about Her Adoption

ROBERT R. ARCHIBALD: Marie-Christine, I’m most interested in just starting with the beginning of your memories of your life and how you happened to come into the world of Miss Dunham.

MARIE-CHRISTINE DUNHAM PRATT: Actually, you know, they did not want to adopt a child. I mean, they were not looking to adopt a child. I was brought there to the Théâtre de Paris in Paris by my biological mother. It’s contrary to reality: She was French, white, and he was from Martinique.

RRA: Your [birth]father was from Martinique?

M-C: Yeah, I was hoping he was from Haiti so much. I love Haiti. But I’m told it was Martinique. And I was brought to the Théâtre de Paris, as I said, by her, and a nun, Sister Catherine, who was like a second mother and who was very good friends with Edith Colombier. That was her name.

				John Pratt, Katherine Dunham and daughter Marie-Christine in Paris. Photograph © 1951, Studio Iris, Paris. Missouri History Museum.

RRA: This was your mother’s name?

M-C: Yeah, Edith Colombier. I was Marie-Christine Colombier before becoming Marie-Christine Dunham Pratt. And I was brought there to the dressing room, and they saw me, and apparently it was love at first sight, and that was it.

RRA: How old were you?

M-C: I was eighteen months old, yes. Not five. It’s written five everywhere, but the papers were final when I was five years old, and that’s why you know…

RRA: So where were you born, in France?

M-C: In Puy. It’s in the Massif Centrale [mountains in south central France] where, you know, where all the dead extinct volcanoes are?

RRA: Right. Was your father with Miss Dunham then?

M-C: Oh yes. In fact, they married to adopt me. They were together, in the arts as in private. But they were not married. They had to marry in order to adopt me.

RRA: What were they doing in Paris at the time?

M-C: Performing, just passing through. And, you know, they were touring.

RRA: What year would that have been?

M-C: ’48, ’49, ’48 actually, end of ’48. And they got married in ’49. And not together. I mean, by proxy. I don’t know where my father was, but Ms. Scott, Margie Scott, who was more than a secretary [to my mother], stood in place of my father when they got married.

RRA: Oh, so your father wasn’t there?

M-C: Yeah, I don’t know where he was. So that’s how I came into the picture.

...Talking about Her Childhood

RRA: Tell me about your upbringing, about what kind of mother your mother was, where you went to school, and where you lived. Were you on the road all the time?

M-C: Yeah, yeah, from the age of two and a half, at least. I lived all over in hotels. We had one house in London for a while that I burned down when I was three years old.

RRA: You burned it down?

M-C: Well, just the top floor.

RRA: What did you do?

M-C: Well, they had left me alone. I had a basket of toys that had a cover, and I had a fireplace in my room with a fire. So you leave me alone with a fire, three years old, and I pushed it towards the fireplace. The cover fell into the fire. So I closed it, and it caught fire. I pushed it under my bed, and my bed caught on fire. My father was downstairs, my mother was performing, and “Marie-Christine, I smell smoke!” “No-no,” [I say]. And then in the end, well, he came up and of course the bed was burning and all. And I was just sitting there looking. I still love fire to this day.

RRA: Did they scold you?

Marie-Christine Dunham Pratt seated in a boat. Photograph, ca. 1953. Missouri History Museum.

M-C: No, I was three. They could not scold me. So no. And my early childhood was traveling, before school that is, between the nuns [in Paris] and my parents. I traveled in Europe. And then I did go to school in Rome.

RRA: So if your parents were really busy with travel and performance, then you would [live] with the nuns?

M-C: Yeah. Well, when they would go far, if I was too little. But I went to school in Rome when I was five, when she [Katherine Dunham] was doing “Mambo” in the French school, Chateaubriand. Where I beat up a little boy because he didn’t want to play with me. I told my parents what happened, and they came, and my mother said, she’s right to have done that—and took me out of that school. But then I went to school in Switzerland. That was the best school, the one I loved.

RRA: How old were you when you went there?

M-C: Six until about nine and a half. In Unterageri in the mountains up over Zurich where we studied in German.

RRA: So you speak German, French, Italian….

M-C: I’m bilingual French/English, since I was little. I don’t know where I learned English, in fact. I just picked it up. Really. Because the first time I went to school in English was in New York when my mother was at Chelsea Hotel. I was then 14, 15. But then I went to school in Paris, in Switzerland, in Haiti when I was ten.

RRA: Were these boarding schools?  Your mother would be off…

M-C: They were all boarding schools. Haiti was the first time I wasn’t in boarding school, when I was ten years old. And then I went back to Paris to boarding school, came back when I was 12, boarding school again and in Haiti that time. I was in boarding school again because I’d done something naughty. I was expelled. In fact, that boarding school.…Bébé Doc went there too. Duvalier’s son. We weren’t in the same class, but he was there and all Tonton Macoutes were all there.

RRA: You knew this?

M-C: Oh, yeah.  I knew him since he was there, we were what, 12, 13.

RRA: So the Tonton Macoutes were all around with their guns?

M-C: Around the school because Jean-Claude was in the school, yeah. Then in Australia, I didn’t go to school. I had a tutor, Chinese. My mother thought I should learn Chinese, so poor Mr. Tong, instead of being only the accountant, became my tutor in Chinese. And he hated me, I hated him. Or he hated me because I hated him, whatever.  And I went to school…where else? In New York in the Bronx, of all places.

RRA: Private school?

M-C: No.

RRA: Public school?

M-C: Yeah, my mother put me there when we were at the Chelsea Hotel. And then I came to school at SIU [Southern Illinois University] in Carbondale because my uncle Davis, my father’s brother, was there to design the department, and I was there for almost a year. It’s a miracle that I passed my bac [secondary school diploma] in Dakar because we were there for the Festival des Arts Nègres in ’66. And then I decided enough with school, that’s it, I stopped there. Moving around so much, I was always arriving late, leaving early to go for vacation across the world.

...Talking about Haiti

RRA: Somewhere along the line, as your mother did, you fell in love with Haiti.

M-C: Oh, god. When I was ten years old, the first time I went there, I arrived with my father. She [KD] was in Japan, and I had my bow and arrow and my slingshot and my forest habitation. I mean, I had traveled all over the place, but this was a real change. I had never been in a place like that. And it was fantastic.

RRA: What was it that attracted you about Haiti?

M-C: Oh, the air, even ’til today also, when you open the door of the plane—I haven’t been there since ’97, I may never go back there—the smell of the island, the people, everything that attracted my mother, attracted me. And my father, too. I mean, I fell in love with Haiti immediately. The people…because often people ask, you know, Haiti, why is it so…the scenery, the vegetation, whatever. It’s beautiful, all the islands are beautiful, too. But in Haiti, it’s the people that make the difference, being the first black republic. Although now look at them. I was a child, so I had been in boarding schools until then. I was not in boarding school that time. And my father had to go to New York for a brief moment, because we were in Habitation Leclerc, so he put me with some friends of his…

RRA: Say what that word means.

Habitation Leclerc. Missouri History Museum.

M-C: Habitation Leclerc, the property. The main property, which Napoleon’s sister used when she was in Haiti. She spent most of her time in Cape Haitian, but she also came to Port-au-Prince, and General Leclerc built that property for her. That’s why it’s called Le Habitation Leclerc.

RRA: So that’s the property that your parents ended up with.

M-C: That was our family house. They bought a few others, but that’s the big one with the forest, one of the last forests that’s still there now.

RRA: Did they view that as their principal home?

M-C: That was our family home. But we were never there except for…I was there when I was ten that time with my father, and I was there when I was 12 with my mother. He wasn’t there. And after that, I went every Christmas to Haiti. My mother wanted to die in Haiti. But after she rented le Habitation Leclerc, [it became a VIP hotel]. That’s when they built the Résidence Leclerc.

RRA: Who built that, your parents?

View of the pool at Résidence Leclerc, Katherine Dunham's property in Haiti. Photograph, ca. 1974. Missouri History Museum.

M-C: My parents. Across the street. And so you have le Habitation Leclerc, and across the street was le Résidence Leclerc. And that was the house where they lived and where I went every Christmas, until you know, people couldn’t stay in Haiti anymore.

RRA: So you went back with your parents at Christmastime?

M-C: They were living there, my mother was living there, unless she had to come to St. Louis for the seminar or whatnot. It was our family house. We never had a house except for Little Chesterfield in London. Then we had an apartment in Rome during “Mambo,” briefly. And then usually it was hotels, big hotels. The Crillon—you know the Crillon—at the Place de la Concorde in Paris where I burned the carpet, with an iron, ironing my dolls' clothes.

RRA: Another story. But you didn’t burn it down.

M-C: No, I guess it was [just] the carpet. There, too, they left me alone. Anyway, and I was little, I was like maybe four or five, and I pulled the big armchair right where the big spot of the iron was and they found me sitting on it.

RRA: You must have been a challenging child.

M-C: I was, yeah, I was an angel or I was a little devil, it depended.

RRA: In Haiti, though. Tell me about the house, and what you ate, and who was there, and what life was like.

M-C: Well, when I was little, I don’t remember what we ate. I don’t remember what cook was there when I was ten. Oh, when I was 12, well, we ate the Haitian food, basically. You know, which is delicious. Rice and beans, chicken the way they make it, the vegetables, because they have a lot of good, good vegetables. They’re grown up in Kenscoff where it’s very high, where it’s rather cool, in fact. And you know, in Haiti you can grow everything. At the time when the French were there, in Napoleon’s time, they even had grapes. And I remember the candy when I was little. [It’s] a ground corn that’s been roasted, and then they put [in] sugar and some other spice. It’s delicious, and it’s a powder, and you eat it. Or “tito,” which was long like this and was sort of a candy that you bought on the street, but it was wrapped. I still remember those. And the fruit. I used to sit in the trees because I was a good tree-climber. And I liked fruit often when it’s not quite mature yet. So mango, I’d sit on the branch, pick, and eat.

RRA: Paradise, huh?

M-C: It was paradise. And I’d go in the forest with my sling-shot and my bow and arrow and kill all the lizards, okay? Which I wouldn’t do now. And I had a Siamese cat, because I love cats. It disappeared that time when I was ten. And I tasted my cat, I realize now, because I was in the forest and there was a guy whom I knew who was working for the place, but you know, he was roasting something and he asked me, he says, you want a gout, if I wanted to taste. So I said, well, okay… and then I went away and I found my cat’s fur behind a tree a little bit further on, so it was…

RRA: Were you upset?

M-C: Yes, I was. But you know, they have nothing to eat, so they eat cats in Haiti. Up to this day, they still eat cats. So you have to be careful there if you have a cat.

...Talking about John Pratt

RRA: Your father was white, right?

M-C: John Pratt, yes. He was more of a mother actually. He was more of a mother than my mother. Yes, he was, yes.

RRA: Is he the one who was the primary caregiver?

M-C: Well, I had nannies all the time obviously, but he had more time than my mother, that’s all. You know, because she was [away] during the day. They had performances at night, but [during] the day, they would rehearse and take class. My father had more time, so he’d take me to the zoo and things like that.

RRA: I don’t mean to digress, but what was your father’s background?

M-C: He was Canadian first of all, naturalized American. He went to the University of Chicago also, although they weren’t there together, but they met after. And he worked with a lot of people before, you know, including Balanchine.

RRA: Was he a designer?

M-C: Yeah, he was always a designer, a painter. He did some beautiful paintings, too. He was a designer and a great one, I’ll say. And then when he met my mother, you could not work with my mother or for my mother and for somebody else. My mother said the Dunham show would not have been quite the same without his costumes and scenery.

Katherine Dunham and John Pratt. Hollywood, California. Photograph by Lette Valeska, 1939. Missouri History Museum.

RRA: Were they in love?

M-C: Oh, yes.

RRA: When did your father die?

M-C: March 26 at 1:30 in 1986. And he said goodbye to my mother in Haiti because he was in [St. Louis at Barnes-Jewish Hospital]. You know, he had cancer. And the tragic thing, I mean, having that is tragic anyway, but everybody loved my father, he was that kind of person. He had such a good sense of humor. He had so much to say, the first cancer was in the tongue. In here. And then he got it here [points to chin]. His tongue was [made] shorter, and they made a graft, you know, to add to the tongue. But people couldn’t understand him at the end very well. I understood everything, but that was hard on him.

RRA: Your father was ill then for a long time.

M-C: Thirteen years.

RRA: There’s a lot of emotion in your voice when you talk about him.

M-C: Yeah, well if I’m not crying, it’s already a lot. His first operation lasted nine hours, this one on the tongue, and here, you know. And Rosita, who was like a voodoo priest, priestess, had told my mother to find an African gray parrot to keep death away from the house. So when they finally find this beautiful African gray parrot, they named him Patrice Lumumba. And Patrice couldn’t stand anybody but my father. He adored my father. And he would imitate my father, he would imitate the sound of the phone ringing, and then he would say "hello," the way my father answered. My father gets this operation, and Patrice was young still, he was fine, in perfect shape. In the middle of the operation, he dropped dead in his cage. And my father, you know, survived for another 13 years.

...Talking about the Dance Company

RRA: Tell me about your work over the years.

M-C:  I [started] writing when I went to Rome. And I taught my mother’s technique, first of all, in Rome.

RRA: Did you dance professionally?

Female dancers performing during “A Katherine Dunham Gala” given at Carnegie Hall when Dunham was presented with the Albert Schweitzer Award. Photograph, 1979. Missouri History Museum.

M-C:  Never, I would never have done that because you know, you have to have the feu sacré (sacred fire) to dance...[the feeling that] you can’t live if you don’t do it. Having the mother I had, I could not be a dancer if I didn’t have the feu sacré. But I attended every single seminar, used to take classes, and then, in Rome, I taught there. And the only time I did dance was when my mother got the Albert Schweitzer Award at Carnegie Hall in ’79. There were three generations of Dunham dancers, the original company—Van and Lucille, all those people. And then the second one, Glory Van Scott and Pearl Reynolds and people like that. And then the PATC, Performing Arts Training Center, and me. I danced there in “Shango.” I didn’t do anything you know, solo or anything like that. But I performed in that.

RRA: Where did your mother recruit dancers? How did she find the dancers?

M-C:  Sometimes shining shoes in South America. No, the American ones she would audition, you know. She had the Dunham School, the main Dunham School in New York, where Marlon Brando and James Dean went. A lot of them came there. So she recruited a lot there.

RRA: Did you know some of those characters as you were growing up?

M-C:  I knew them all, the main company, yes, I knew them all. They were like my uncles and aunts a little bit. I mean, some of them even took me to the zoo. My mother always wanted people to take me to the zoo.

RRA: The zoo with James Dean—that seems strange.

M-C:  Oh yes, I knew them all. In fact, Lucille—I’m jumping from one thing to the other—missed her “Cakewalk” cue in the theater somewhere, there again I was around five, five and a half or six maybe, and the dressing rooms of the company were downstairs. And “Cakewalk” was the last number, full company with my mother. The key of Lucille’s dressing room was outside of the door, so I was passing by and I closed it and she missed the whole thing. She couldn’t get out.

RRA: Did you lock her in?

M-C:  Yeah. And they couldn’t hear her because the dressing rooms were downstairs, so nobody came to get her so she missed the cue.

RRA: Was it hard being [Katherine Dunham’s] daughter at times?

M-C:  No, no, it was great, it was fantastic. As a child, it was fantastic, wonderful. But she was a strict mother. Where it became a little bit difficult was when I was a teenager, Because I had my character, she had hers. But no, I was always very proud of her, and I always told her how beautiful she was. She was always happy with that, when I was a child.

...Talking about Katherine Dunham's Legacy

RRA: You’ve had an exceptional life. I mean, you’re sort of a global citizen. You’ve lived all over. And you must have lots of perspectives on your life, of how exceptional it is.

M-C: Yeah, well I didn’t do exceptional things. I mean, yes, I traveled a lot and I had an exceptional mother, which then in turn enabled me to…. But basically I had fun all my life. And I had a lot of conversations about this with my mother. I had a mother complex first of all.

Marie-Christine Dunham Pratt as a model. Photograph by Dick Frisell, ca. 1970s. Missouri History Museum.

RRA: What kind of mother complex?

M-C: Well, you know, having this great mother, and my parents never really asked me what I wanted to do, and I didn’t know what I wanted to do. And I still don’t, almost. But I was exposed to a lot, obviously, being that my mother when I was little was a huge star all over.

RRA: How much time did you spend in East St. Louis?

M-C: Well, really I came every year, and all the time, to seminar or whatever, or before the seminar to visit. But I did spend one year here when my mother was in Caracas for a long time, and I stayed with my father. Taking classes at the Broadview building—that was a good year. And I took photography, and Dunham Technique, and percussion, and karate, which I love. And that was the year, that famous year where Ural Wilson, who was one of the original members, was killed, you know, in East St. Louis. So I spent that amount of time here, otherwise it was just visits.

RRA: When you talk about preserving your mother’s legacy, if you could do that in an ideal way, what would it be? What do you want to be remembered?

M-C: What I would like, really, in her legacy, is that everybody knows again who Katherine Dunham was, what she did. And her technique is what worries me the most. This technique, a lot of people are putting in their own expression—it’ll be watered down.

RRA: But the technique is only passed on by one dancer to another, right?

M-C: Yeah, but the thing is to teach it pure. You can put your own expression in your choreography, your influence. But not when you’re teaching Dunham Technique. That’s another thing about her legacy, is the technique, her choreographies, everything [should be notated] so that when everybody’s gone, they will be able to reconstruct a number. And then her centers here, that’s another thing, you know, should survive.

				Marie-Christine Dunham Pratt. Photograph © 2008, Missouri History Museum.

RRA: I just want to tell you what a pleasure and honor it’s been to spend this time talking to you about your life and your mother’s life and your work.

M-C: Yes, I know you admired my mother very much, and she liked you very much too.

RRA: I liked her, I was in awe of her. And honored when I was in her presence. This interview has been a delight.

M-C: Yes, it’s been a delight for me too.

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