Pearl Primus Overview

When Pearl Primus was studying anthropology in graduate school, she had no idea that her part-time job with the National Youth Administration would lead to a spectacular career in dance. Her understudy role with the NYA dance group converted her from... [more]

When Pearl Primus was studying anthropology in graduate school, she had no idea that her part-time job with the National Youth Administration would lead to a spectacular career in dance. Her understudy role with the NYA dance group converted her from a co-ed to a chorine overnight. Immensely talented yet unschooled in technique, she sought serious modern training with Martha Graham and Charles Weidman, uniting these two disparate loves in her metamorphosis into a concert dancer. Primus entered the New York dance world in 1943 with a torrent of political pieces. She revealed the sinister side of the American experience in "America: Strange Fruit" (a response to Southern lynchings), "Slave Market," and "Hard Time Blues" (an expression of outrage against sharecropping). Primus's 'dances of protest' are eloquent expressions of the painful impacts of racist culture. Her years of academic research in African cultures culminated in vivid pieces about the black experience on both continents. Primus' rousing polyrhythmic interpretations of African rituals stirred African, Caribbean, and African American tempos into a series of multi-ethnic productions, redolent with a rich heritage of symbol, myth, and meaning. These historic pieces reinvented the content and shape of the modern dance. In 1948, after years of painstaking research, Primus received a Rosenwald Fellowship to perform throughout Africa and to observe indigenous dances. Christened Omowale -- meaning 'child returned home' -- while in Nigeria, Primus traveled extensively between continents, absorbing African rites and rituals and translating them for her American audiences. Named director of Liberia's Performing Arts Center in 1959, Primus continued her bicultural odyssey and opened the Primas-Borde School of Primal Dance in New York City. [show less]