By
richardg
– March 31, 2011Posted in: Art and Music
Career
Primus began to research African dance, “consulting books, articles, and pictures and visiting museums’. After six months, she had completed her first composition, African Ceremonial. It was presented along with Strange Fruit, Rock Daniel, and Hard Time Blues at her debut performance on February 14, 1943 at the 92nd Street YMHA. Her performance was so outstanding that John Martin of the New York Times states that “she was entitled to a company of her own.”
Her next performances began in April 1943, as an entertainer at the famous night club, Cafe Society Downtown, for ten months.
In June 1943, Primus performed at the Negro Freedom Rally at Madison Square Garden before an audience of 20,000 people.
Primus also choreographed a work to Langston Hughes’s famous poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”, which was performed at her Broadway debut on October 4, 1944 at the Bealson Theatre.
She then began to study more intensively at the New Dance Group and became one of their instructors. In the summer of 1944, Primus visited the Deep South to research the culture and dances of Southern blacks. She visited over seventy churches and picked cotton with the sharecroppers. In December 1943, Primus appeared as a guest artist in Asadata Dafora’s African Dance Festival at Carnegie Hall.
Pearl Primus (Negro Speaks of Rivers) – Large.m4v
In December 1944, Primus, who was primarily a solo artist recruited other dancers and performed in concerts at the Roxy Theatre. African Ceremonial was rechoreographed for a group performance. At this time, Primus’ African choreography could be termed interpretive, based on research and her imagining of the way in which a piece of African sculpture would move.
In 1946, Primus was invited to appear in the revival of the Broadway production Showboat choreographed by Helen Tamiris. Then, she was asked to choreograph a Broadway production called Calypso whose title became Caribbean Carnival. She also appeared at the Chicago Theatre in the 1947 revival of the Emperor Jones in the ‘’’Witch Doctor’’’ role that Hemsley Winfield made famous.
Following this show and many subsequent recitals, Primus toured the nation with a company she formed. While on the university and college circuit, Primus performed at Fisk University in 1948, where Dr. Charles S. Johnson, a member of Rosenwald Foundation board, was president. He was so impressed with the power of her interpretive African dances that he asked her when she had last visited Africa. She replied that she had never done so. She then received the last and largest ($4000) of the major Rosenwald Fellowships for an eighteen month research and study tour of the Gold Coast, Angola, Cameroons, Liberia, Senegal and the Belgian Congo.
Primus was so well accepted in the communities in her study tour that she was told that the ancestral spirit of an African dancer had manifested in her. The Oni and people of Ife, Nigeria, felt that she was so much a part of their community that they initiated her into their commonwealth and affectionately conferred on her the title Omowale- the child who has returned home.
continue reading…..pt.4
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