Othella Dallas, who was one of the last surviving early members of the Katherine Dunham Dance Company, the nation’s first self-supporting Black modern dance troupe, and taught the Afro-Caribbean-influenced Dunham technique in Europe well into her 90s, died on Nov. 28 at a nursing home in Binningen, Switzerland. She was 95.
Her son, Peter Wydler, said the cause was lung cancer.
The sound of conga drums reverberated at Ms. Dallas’s studio in Basel, Switzerland, for years as she gyrated to their rhythm. Her students watched reverently, eager to learn from a woman who had learned from Dunham, the matriarch of Black dance, who died in 2006.