Lavinia Williams

Lavinia Williams was born on the twenty-fourth of June 1916 at Philadelphia, the daughter of an Black-Philadelphia working-class household of the Philadelphia North Philadelphia district of the early twentieth century. She was raised in the segregated Black-Philadelphia of the inter-war period.

She was placed at six at the Philadelphia Coloured Schools and at the Philadelphia High School for Girls — the principal Philadelphia public secondary school for girls — for the secondary education.

She took the bachelor’s at the Howard University at Washington, D.C. in 1937 — concentrated in art and physical education — among the principal pre-war Black-Howard graduates of the period.

She took the formal modernist-dance training at the Hampton Institute summer dance programme under Charles Williams at Hampton, Virginia from 1937 to 1939 and was the principal Hampton concert-dance student of the period.

She was hired in 1939 by Katherine Dunham (placed in this archive) for the Katherine Dunham Dance Company at the Manhattan Forty-Eighth Street Theatre programme of the closing months of 1939. She danced with the Dunham Dance Company across the principal Manhattan period from 1939 to 1944 — including the Dunham Manhattan Broadway production Cabin in the Sky (1940) and the closing 1942 Hollywood production Stormy Weather.

She took further training at the New Dance Group at Manhattan from 1944 to 1947 under the principal post-war modernist-dance teachers — and at the Martha Graham Studio at Manhattan from 1946 to 1949.

She undertook her first principal Caribbean field-research dance tour at Port-au-Prince in 1953 at the invitation of the Haitian Government Department of Tourism for the establishment of a Haitian National Ballet — under the personal supervision of Haitian President Paul Magloire. She founded at Port-au-Prince in 1953 the Théâtre National d’Haïti — the first systematic ballet-and-modernist-dance training school at Port-au-Prince. She held the directorship of the Théâtre National d’Haïti through to 1959.

She was named in 1959 by the President of Guyana Forbes Burnham as the founding director of the National School of Dance of Guyana at Georgetown — at the close of the Magloire administration of Haiti. She founded at Georgetown the principal Caribbean ballet-and-modernist-dance training school of the post-war period and directed the National School of Dance of Guyana from 1959 to 1966.

She returned to Port-au-Prince in 1966 at the close of the Burnham régime arrangement at Georgetown and reopened the Théâtre National d’Haïti as the principal Port-au-Prince ballet-and-modernist-dance training school of the closing years of the Duvalier régime period — across the closing two decades of her life.

She trained at the Haitian and Guyanese institutions over a thousand professional concert-dancers across the post-war Caribbean of the period — including the principal Haitian-and-Guyanese concert-dancers of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

She died at Port-au-Prince, Haiti on the eighteenth of July 1989 of natural causes, at seventy-three.

She is honored here as the founder of the Haitian and Guyanese national ballets.