Pearl Primus

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Pearl Primus (29 November 1919, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago – 29 October 1994) was a dancer, choreographer and anthropologist.

Pearl Primus immigrated to the United States on board the S.S. Voltaire and arrived at Ellis Island on June 24, 1924. According to the passenger list she was two years old. She made her theatrical debut on February 24th, 1943, at the 92nd Street YM-YWHA as a social-protest dancer in New York City. Her concerns and expression fit into the landscape of the ongoing Harlem renaissance and gained much public support. She was immediately graced with attention after her first professional solo debut. Her dances were inspired by revolutionary choreographer Katherine Dunham. She became known for her exceptional ability to jump very high while dancing. She focused on matters such as oppression, racial prejudice, and violence. Her efforts were also subsidized by the United States government who encouraged African-American artistic endeavors.

Pearl Primus studied at the New Dance Group's school in New York City. She was nurtured by the school's politicized approach to making art "for the people." Their sentiment was that dance was to be used as a tool to reform. Miss Primus went on to create the Primus Board "Earth Theatre." Earth Theatre produced many well known dancers, including the late Cheryl Byron.

Primus was born in Trinidad and raised in New York City, where she attended Hunter College. After graduating in 1940 with a degree in biology, she received a scholarship to study at the New School for Social Research in New York. Primus made her professional debut in New York in 1943, performing her own "African Ceremonial." She then began performing at the Cafe Society Downtown, an integrated nightclub, and in 1944 she gave her first solo recital, performing to poetry and the music of folksinger Josh White. That show met with such success that it moved to Broadway. In 1946, Primus appeared in a New York revival of "Showboat," as well as in Louis Gruenberg's opera "The Emperor Jones" at the Chicago Civic Opera. Primus, who founded her own dance company in 1946 (called the Pearl Primus Dance Language Institute), was best known for her "primitive" dances. She was famed for her energy and her physical daring, which were characterized by leaps up to five feet in the air. Dance critics praised her movements as forceful and dramatic, yet graceful and deliberately controlled. During this time Primus often based her dances on the work of black writers and on racial issues. In 1944, she interpreted Langston Hughes' "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (1944), and in 1945 she created "Strange Fruit", based on the poem by Lewis Allan about a lynching. "Hard Time Blues" (1945) is based on a song about sharecroppers by folksinger Josh White. In 1949, Primus received a grant from the Julius Rosenwald Foundation to study dance in Central and West Africa. In the years that followed, she also studied and danced throughout the Caribbean and the southern United States. She drew her subjects from a variety of black cultures and figures, ranging from African stonecutters to Caribbean religious practices to rural life in the American South.

Primus married the dancer and choreographer Percival Borde in 1954, and began a collaboration that ended only with his death in 1979. In 1959, the year Primus received an M.A. in education from New York University, she traveled to Liberia, where she worked with the National Dance Company there to create "Fanga," an interpretation of a traditional Liberian invocation to the earth and sky. In 1978, Primus received a Ph.D. in Dance Education from New York University. The following year she created "Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore," about the 1963 Birmingham, Alabama, church bombing. From 1984 to 1990 Primus served as a professor of ethnic studies, and artist in residence at the Five Colleges consortium in Massachusetts. In 1990, she became the first chair of the Five Colleges Dance Consortium. Her original dance company eventually grew into the Pearl Primus Dance Language Institute, where her method of blending African-American, Caribbean, and African influences with modern dance and ballet techniques is taught. In 1991, President George Bush honored Primus with the National Medal of Arts.