Othella Dallas, Who Kept The Flame Of Katherine Dunham’s Dance Technique Burning, 95

Dallas taught Dunham’s dance style, “a polyrhythmic style rooted in early Black dance that Dunham developed through her ethnographic research in the Caribbean in the 1930s,” well into her 90s at her studio in Basel, Switzerland. “You feel it like a religion. … It’s in our bloodline. You live with it when you teach it. You respect it. And then you give it to someone else, so they may have the honor of teaching it and seeing the genius of Dunham.” – The New York Times