Pearl Primus

Pearl Primus (1919-1994), Trinidadian American dancer, choreographer, and anthropologist, whose work helped establish the importance of African American dance in United States culture. Primus was born in Trinidad and moved with her family to the United States as a young child. In 1940 she graduated from Hunter College with a degree in biology and premedical studies. Primus planned to become a doctor, but could not find a position in the medical field due to racial prejudice and the depressed economy of the time. Instead she became involved with a dance group and, after rapid progress, won a scholarship with the New Dance Group. There she studied, taught, and researched her first major choreographic work, African Ceremonial, which debuted in 1943. In 1948 she won a Rosenwald Fellowship and spent 18 months traveling and studying dance in Africa. Primus subsequently returned to Africa several times to research and perform her work, and she spent two years as director of Liberia's Performing Arts Center. She met her husband, Percival Borde, in 1953 while spending the summer in the West Indies studying Caribbean dance forms. She and her husband collaborated on several works and opened a dance school in New York City. Primus lectured and taught both dance and anthropology throughout the United States. In 1978 she completed her doctorate in anthropology at New York University. Much of her work, such as Congolese Wedding (1974), composed for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and Fanga (1941), utilized her knowledge of African and Caribbean dances. She also examined racial issues in the United States in such well-known dance pieces as Strange Fruit (1943), about a woman's reaction to a lynching, and The Negro Speaks of Rivers (1944), based on the poem by American writer Langston Hughes. Her work has been performed in Broadway musicals and by her own dance company.