Rita Christiani: Trinidad and Tobago’s first noted dancer in Hollywood films

By Ray Funk

FORGOTTEN today, Rita Christiani was a distinguished Trinidadian actor and dancer who appeared in a series of Hollywood films in the 1940s. She was born in Port of Spain on December 22, 1917, came to the US at a young age and grew up in Harlem, New York City. As a young woman, she appeared in a series of productions with the Federal Theatre Project, a federal government project to put out of work actors and theatre professionals to work during the height of the Great Depression.

The first was at the Lafayette Playhouse in Harlem in 1937 a play called Sweet Land looking at the lives of sharecroppers and tenant farmers and who were starting to unionise and organise. Later that year, she was a tight rope walker and a clown in a children’s play called Horse Play and in 1939, she appeared in a production of Pinocchio. But she is primarily noted as a dancer.

In 1940, she was featured in a concert at the Manhattan Center doing “new folk dances” performed to spirituals sung by a well-known Negro baritone.” She was described as having performed at the Cuban village at the World’s Fair. During this period, she joined the Katherine Dunham dance company by February 1940 where she quickly become a leading dancer as the troupe travelled across America in a national tour. The tour ended in Los Angeles for a series of shows that appears to have brought Christiani to the attention of the film industry.

Over the next few years, amazingly she appears in seven feature films with casts of many of the biggest acting stars of the time from Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Rita Hayworth, Ginger Rogers, Henry Fonda, Tyrone Power, Anthony Quinn, Errol Flynn, Betty Davis, Humphrey Bogart and Maureen O’Hara.

In 1942, she appears in three films. In the anthology film Tales of Manhattan, she appears only momentarily getting a hug from Paul Robson when money rains down on a rural village. But she is centre screen in dance performances in the other two. In a swashbuckling pirate film, The Black Swan, she dances with a number of drummers in brief dance sequence set in the coastal city of Maracaibo, Venezuela in 1697.

In Road to Morocco, she literally leaps onto centre stage to perform a dance.

This scene is her most memorable one in Hollywood. A review in the People’s Voice noted:

[T]he language she speaks with her feet is universal. It is aided by a flashing pair of eyes and highly educated hips...Her accompaniment is a wild rhythmic beat…As a finale, two sword throwers throw flashing blades back and forth in front of her and behind her leaping, writhing form. The effect is so terrific that her audience, including Bing Crosby and Bob Hope grow bug-eyed as they watch.

In 1943, Christiani performed in four films, most are very short sequences. In the benefit film for relief during the war, Thank Your Lucky Stars she appears briefly on camera as support for singer Hattie McDaniel’s song Ice Cold Katie where she appears reluctant to marry a soldier going off to war but changes her mind. Then in Cabin in the Sky she is a briefly seen as a jitterbug dancer while the Duke Ellington Orchestra performs.

Her final two films both have her appear with another Trinidadian, the great calypso singer Sir Lancelot. In the first, Happy Go Lucky, in the scene where Lancelot sings Roaring Lion’s Ugly Woman, she comes from the side and quickly dances around him. Lastly, she has a momentary appearance in another film with Sir Lancelot called I Walked with the Zombies.

With so many appearances from momentary to full dance sequences and numerous mentions in the cinema press, it looked like her dance career was taking off. At the time, columnist Freddie Doyle in Theatre World noted that she was rated as one of the finest in “her original style of Latin American dancing.” But then it stopped and nothing is written in why it ended.

She would appear in a very different type of film a few years later, Maya Daren’s avant-garde 15-minute film, Ritual in Transfigured Time. Shown at universities across the US in 1945 and 1946, it has gone on to become one of the most legendary avant-garde films in history. It has been discussed in dozens of books and articles over the years as the film work of Maya Deren have become legendary even though she only did a handful of short films. Maya Deren and Rita Christiani met in New York when Deren was hired on as Dunham’s assistant before the troupe crossed the United States on the tour when Christiani was a member. They became close friends and that led to Deren picking her to be a co-star in this strange and powerful short film.

Ritual in Transfigured Time is a difficult film to describe it features four actors coming together in a dream like environment, separating, then at a cocktail party, then at an outdoor park and eventually at a dock where Christiani appears to drown and combine with the role played by Deren herself.

There is a full-length documentary film that focuses on this filmmaker’s work, In the Mirror of Maya Deren (2001) by Martina Kudlácek. In it, there are scenes and a detailed discussion of Ritual in Transfigured Time with extensive outtakes from the film and the only recorded interview with Christiani in which she comments briefly on the making of the film.

In the interview, Christiani describes the bond she had with Deren, how both had travelled as young children by boat to the US, Deren from Ukraine and Christiani from Trinidad.

Coming here at this young age, unless you have experienced it, you don’t know what it is. Everything is new to you and everything is so frightening to you: people, places, the way people talked, the way they act and the you had to speak English to become an American. That was the goal to become American.

The last references to her dancing professionally are in 1948, she was in Chicago performing in a production of Show Boat and later that year does a recital in Detroit with the Haitian dancer Jean Leon Destine and his troupe. Christiani was also featured in a magazine pictorial that year noting that she and Boscoe Holder had gone to Martinique together a few years earlier and planned a dance tour but no information exists that a tour ever occurred. Sadly, these are the last references to her dancing career.

At this point, it appears Christiani abandoned dance for an entirely new career. She became a nurse in Chicago and worked for the school system. The few references that survive tell little. In a collection of Katherine Dunham writings, she noted “Rita Christiani, beautiful Rita, who was, I believe, from Trinidad and is now a nurse in Chicago.” Chrsitiani appears in the photo of graduates in 1953 for the Cook County School of Nursing and in a 1963 newspaper clipping, she participated at a conference on mental retardation and children. Nothing later is known except that she passed away in Brooklyn in 2008.

But she should not be forgotten. All of her films are available online, most can be seen for free on YouTube. Christiani had an amazing career when you consider it, acting in New York, dancing across America, appearing in several Hollywood films, featured in a haunting avant-garde film and then to change careers to become a nurse and teacher.