People, Locations, Episodes

Sat, 11.29.1919

Pearl Primus, Choreographer born

*Pearl Primus was born on this date in 1919. She was a Black Trinidadian American dancer, choreographer, and anthropologist. Her work helped establish the importance of African dance in United States culture.

Primus was from Trinidad and moved to the United States as a child with her family. 1940, she graduated from Hunter College with a biology and premedical studies degree.  Primus planned to become a doctor, but she joined a dance group. After rapid progress, she studied, taught, and researched her first major choreographic work, African Ceremonial, in 1943. 1948, she won a Rosenwald Fellowship and spent 18 months traveling and studying dance in Africa.  Primus returned to Africa several times, spending two years as director of Liberia's Performing Arts Center.

She and her husband, Percival Borde, 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 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, about a woman's reaction to a lynching, and The Negro Speaks of Rivers, based on the poem by American writer Langston Hughes.

Primus died in 1994. Her own dance company has performed her work in many Broadway musicals.

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