At the gala opening of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s production of The Magic of Catherine Dunham at City Center in December, the first indication that this was going to be a different sort of evening at the ballet came during the seventy-eight-year-old choreographer’s introductory curtain speech, when she casually referred to her dances as “numbers.” Dunham’s popular success dates from 1940, when she brought her revue Tropics and Le Jazz Hot—subtitled “From Haiti to Harlem”—to Broadway. Later that year she created the role of Georgia Brown and collaborated with George Balanchine on the choreography of Cabin in the Sky. Then it was on to Hollywood, where Dunham and her Dancers backed up Lena Home in Stormy Weather. When she returned to Broadway it was under the management of Sol Hurok and, in the words of John Martin, the New York Times’s dance critic, “with a mantle of glamour about her shoulders.” The run of Dunham’s 1943 Tropical Revue had to be extended from two weeks to six, setting a record for a full evening of dance.

Edwin Denby, covering Tropical Revue for the Herald Tribune, pointed out to his readers that the evening was not a dance recital (which was the term the modern dancers then used to refer to their sporadic appearances at Broadway theaters on Sundays, when, owing to inscrutable blue laws, non-dance theatrical entertainment was proscribed), but that he wanted to talk about it as if it were.