| 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, 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
Allen 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.
-- Elizabeth V. Foley
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