Primus, Pearl Eileen

Impact on the world

Made her Broadway debut in 1944 with choreography set to Langston Hughes's poem 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers,' and that same period developed 'Strange Fruit,' a piece based on the anti-lynching poem of the same name portraying the psychological aftermath experienced by a member of a lynch mob; she undertook a 1948 Rosenwald Fellowship-funded research trip to Liberia and other West African nations specifically to study African dance forms in their original cultural context, insisting on presenting them with full authenticity rather than the loosely interpretive 'African-inspired' style common among other American dance troupes of her era, and went on to complete a PhD in dance and anthropology at New York University in 1978.

Life & background

Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad in 1919 and raised in New York City from age two, Primus graduated from Hunter College in 1940 with a biology and pre-medical degree, only to discover that racial discrimination blocked her path to medical research entirely, even barring her from laboratory technician work; she instead found employment through the National Youth Administration's dance unit, where filling in as an understudy revealed an unexpected, formidable talent. Within a year she had won a scholarship to the New Dance Group, becoming the school's first Black student, and by December 1943 had recruited her own company to perform at Carnegie Hall before an audience including Eleanor Roosevelt and Mary McLeod Bethune. Her choreography increasingly explored the relationship between the African diaspora's enslavement and the cultural dance forms that survived it, and her 1948 fellowship took her to Liberia, where President William Tubman personally awarded her the Star of Africa medal, before further research trips to Angola and Senegal; she met and married fellow dancer Percival Borde while abroad, and the couple later founded their own joint dance company. She balanced an extensive teaching career, including positions at NYU, Howard University, and the Five Colleges consortium in Massachusetts, with her own continuing fieldwork, completing her doctorate at NYU's School of Education in 1978 after decades of combining rigorous scholarship with performance; she died in 1994, leaving behind a body of choreography, including 'Fanga,' a Liberian welcome dance later staged with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, that remains performed today.

Sources

1. New York Amsterdam News; EBSCO Research Starters; Notable Folklorists of Color