Pearl Primus - American Anthropologist, Dancer, and Choreographer

Hey Dancers! This weeks' Friday Feature is Pearl Primus. Primus was the first black modern dancer, she used dance to to express the social and political constraints on black people within America.

"Why do I dance? Dance is my medicine. Dance is the fist with which I fight the sickening ignorance of prejudice."

Pearl Primus was born on November 29 1919, in Port of Spain, Trinidad. Primus and her family moved to New York when she was two years old. Originally wanting to be a physician, Primus earned her degree in biology and premedical from Hunter College in 1940 in New York. While taking health education courses at New York University, Primus sought employment at a laboratory but was deterred by racial discrimination. Unable to get a job in the medical field, she was hired to be in the dance unit of the National Youth Administration and soon received a scholarship from the New Dance Group, where she studied modern dance and made her debut in 1943. The following year she gave a solo recital, which led to multiple Broadway engagements. Primus’s first major choreographic work, “African Ceremonial” (1944), attested to her early studies of her black heritage. In 1948 she received a Rosenwald Foundation scholarship to travel to Africa to study dance, which would become the first of many research trips. The trip got Primus to fuse African dance forms with modern dance and ballet technique with an anthropologist’s lens. Although most of her other dances are based on early West Indian forms, she also choreographed pieces about American life, including “Strange Fruit” (1945), one of her most popular dances, which was a reference to the practice of lynching. In addition to choreography, she was the director of the Performing Arts Centre in Liberia (1959–61) and earned a master’s in education (1959) and a doctorate in anthropology (1978) from New York University. In 1979 Primus and her husband Percival Borde established the Pearl Primus Dance Language Institute in New York, where they taught fusion dance classes based on Primus’ research. President George H.W. Bush awarded Primus the National Medal of Arts in 1991, and the Liberian Government honoured her with the “Star of Africa.” Primus passed away on October 29, 1994. Although Primus is no longer with us, we were lucky enough to have her share and create her work, who knows where we would be in the dance world without her!

Cite:

Griffin, C. (2018, June 28). Three African-American Women Who Revolutionized Modern Dance. Retrieved October 09, 2020, from https://www.kcet.org/shows/artbound/three-african-american-women-who-revolutionized-modern-dance

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Pearl Primus.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 16 June 2020, www.britannica.com/biography/Pearl-Primus.

Thanks for checking in this week Dancers! Have a great reading week and a Happy Thanksgiving!