Romero, Carmencita, 1914- 2001

Carmencita Romero (1914-2001) was a dancer who was associated with Katherine Dunham's earliest efforts to establish a dance company in Chicago, first, as a member of her short-lived Ballet Nègre, and as a charter member of the Katherine Dunham Dance Company. Romero later taught the Dunham Technique at schools in the United States, Europe, and Japan.

She was born Lily May Butler (there are many variant spellings of her first name on official records) in Brookhaven, Mississippi on January 2, 1914, but the family later moved to Chicago, Illinois. As Lily Butler, she began her dance training at 18, studying ballet and modern dance with Dunham and performing in her staging of the dances in the Chicago production of Run, Little Chillun in 1934. When Dunham returned from her anthropology fieldwork in the West Indies, Butler began learning the Afro-Caribbean dance forms that Dunham had studied in Jamaica, Martinique, Trinidad, and Haiti. In 1938, she appeared in the premiere of Dunham's full length work, L'Ag'Ya. Dunham chose Butler, who, by that time, had officially adopted the stage name, Carmencita Romero, as one of the dancers she took with her to New York when she received an offer to choreograph some numbers for a new edition of the Broadway revue, Pins and Needles, in 1939. Romero also would appear on Broadway with Dunham and the rest of the Dunham dancers in the hit Broadway musical, Cabin in the Sky (1940), touring with that production and remaining with the Dunham company until around 1942.

Romero performed at nightclubs in Chicago and other cities during the early 1940s and appeared again on Broadway as a dancer in Carmen Jones (1943). In the late 1940s, she returned to Chicago, where she opened a dance school on the South Side. Romero appeared frequently with a small troupe of her former students, billed as the Carmencita Romero Dancers, at nightclubs and other venues, as well as an episode of the ABC television variety series, The Little Revue, featuring the singer Etta Moten. Romero later opened dance schools in Tokyo and Rome and taught throughout Europe. After returning to the United States in 1981, she became an instructor at Spelman College in Atlanta. Romero spent her later years in New York City, residing at Manhattan Plaza, and continuing to teach and occasionally perform. Her last public appearance was in a program with the Joan Peters Dance Company at the Donnell Library Center, New York Public Library in December 2000.

Carmencita Romero passed away at the Florence Nightingale Nursing Home in Manhattan on May 6, 2001 at the age of 87.