Music: Little Primitive

Seven years ago, a squat, powerful Negro girl named Pearl Primus, who had just graduated in biology from Manhattan’s Hunter College, was ringing doorbells in search of a laboratory job. She did not find the job, but she walked into an NYA group that started her dancing. Last week, at the University of the Dance at rustic Jacob’s Pillow, Mass., where Pearl Primus was a guest artist, students saw one of the U.S.’s most spectacular dancers in terrific action.

Stomping Dignity. Pearl Primus is no filmy ballerina. Her forte is force. Says she: “My body is built for heavy stomping, powerful dignity.” She usually dances to an accompaniment of pulsing drums. In one of her new works, Santo, a psychological study of the clash of Voodooism and Christianity in Cuba, fascinated students watched an exhibition of primitive, pantherlike power and grace. In The Shouters of Sobo, a work based on the traditions of African stonecutters, students got a lesson in gripping, concentrated intensity. With muscled shoulders hunched over bended knees, her powerful arms pounding, her whole body dynamically dramatic, everything about her was directed downward with terrible force.

Less than a year after she started dancing, Pearl Primus won a New Dance Group scholarship, later studied with Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman (TIME, July 28), who called her “my little primitive,” and West Indian Dancer Belle Rosette, who taught her how to freeze her mobile features and saucer-white eyes into demoniac, war-mask grimaces.

After her smash debut in a. New Dance Group recital, Pearl danced in Manhattan nightclubs, where she was a sensation, and as Sal and Dahomey Queen in Showboat. But after eleven months, she quit the show for more study. Since then, she has made concert appearances throughout the U.S. Wrote the New York Times’s sober dance critic John Martin: “. . . It would be unfair to classify her merely as an outstanding Negro dancer, for by any standard she is … outstanding . . . her dances are all fine and authentic in spirit, well composed and danced with great technical skill as well as dramatic power.”

Acrobatic Anthropologist. Like another outstanding Negro dancer, Katherine Dunham, Pearl, now 27, is a serious student of anthropology which, she claims, has a direct bearing on her art. She is now working for a Ph.D. at Columbia University. Says she: “What I try to express in my dancing is the culture of the Negro people. … I am not preaching a ‘back to Africa’ movement. I am simply trying to show the Negro his African heritage and make him see that his culture had a dignity and strength and cleanliness. . . . I don’t know yet what I have to say about my own life or place in my own land. But some day I hope to be able to say, ‘This is my expression, this is what I have to say.'”