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Recruiting Places: Pearl Primus's Plans for Global Activism through Community-Engaged Dance Theatre

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2024

Jessica Friedman
Jessica Friedman*
Affiliation:
Independent Scholar, Department of Theatre and Dance, California State University, Fullerton, CA 92834, USA
*
Email: [email protected]
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Extract

In the summer of 1944, Black modern dancer Pearl Primus searched for authenticity. Over the past year, she had achieved critical success for her modern dance choreography that protested racial injustice in the South, informed by a leftist political mission. However, she thought something was missing. She explained to Dance Magazine, “I had done dances about sharecroppers and lynchings without ever having been close to such things.” In search of that missing component, Primus traveled from New York City, her home since she was a toddler, to the US South. A budding anthropologist, she went to live among Southern communities as a way to retool her protest choreography and make it more authentic. Unbeknownst to them, Southern community members would be recruited by her to provide inspiration for her performances and the leftist political stance that fueled those works. In identifying authentic expressive practices of the South through her anthropological practice, transferring what she found to her choreography, and then performing that repertoire on New York stages, she would further develop her ability to instill in Northern audiences the necessity of leftist activism.

Type
Article
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 65 , Issue 3 , September 2024 , pp. 208 - 226
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors, 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Society for Theatre Research, Inc.

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Footnotes

Many thanks to Susan Manning for her thoughtful feedback on the direction of this article. Thank you to Claudia Kinahan, Jonathan Rizzardi, and Tara Rodman for engaging with this research and offering comments at various stages.

References

Notes

1 Goodman, Ezra, “Hard Time Blues: Pearl Primus of Show Boat Dances for Herself—and People,” Dance Magazine 20.4 (1946): 30–1Google Scholar, 55–6, at 55.

2 Schwartz, Peggy and Schwartz, Murray, The Dance Claimed Me: A Biography of Pearl Primus (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 72Google Scholar.

3 Ibid., 76.

4 Manning, Susan, Modern Dance, Negro Dance: Race in Motion (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Green, Richard C., “(Up)Staging the Primitive: Pearl Primus and ‘the Negro Problem’ in American Dance,” in Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance, ed. DeFrantz, Thomas F. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 105–39Google Scholar.

5 Kowal, Rebekah J., “Dance Travels ‘Walking with Pearl,’” Performance Research 12.2 (2007): 85–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kowal, Rebekah J., How to Do Things with Dance: Performing Change in Postwar America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2010), esp. chap. 4Google Scholar.

6 Griffin, Farah Jasmine, “Pearl Primus and the Idea of a Black Radical Tradition,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 17.1 (40) (2013): 40–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Griffin, Farah Jasmine, Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists & Progressive Politics during World War II (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2013)Google Scholar.

7 Kuftinec, Sonja Arsham, “‘Do You Need Help?’: Dialogics of Change in Community-Based Theatre,” Theatre Survey 57.3 (2016): 419–23, at 419CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Richard Dier, “Interview with La Primus: Story of a Great Dancer Who Has Been Graduated from Cafe Society into Big Time,” Baltimore Afro-American, 21 October 1944, 5.

9 Goodman, “Hard Time Blues.”

10 Pearl Primus, “Diary by Pearl Primus, 1943–1949,” Box 2, Pearl Primus Collection, American Dance Festival Archives, Duke University Libraries, Durham, NC.

11 For modern dance stakeholders’ formulations of dance theatre during the 1940s, see Jessica Friedman, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Women Choreographers of 1940s American Modern Dance” (Ph.D. diss., Theatre and Drama, Northwestern University, June 2023), 21–39; https://arch.library.northwestern.edu/downloads/5h73pw49m?locale=en.

12 Rossinow, Doug, Visions of Progress: The Left-Liberal Tradition in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 2–4Google Scholar.

13 Ibid., 4.

14 Schwartz and Schwartz, Dance Claimed Me, 37, 258. Primus studied anthropology and African culture independently until she enrolled in an anthropology doctoral program in Columbia University in 1945.

15 For Primus's disappointment in the South, see Dier, “Interview with La Primus”; Goodman, “Hard Time Blues.”

16 Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century, updated paperback ed. (London and New York: Verso, 2010).

17 Ibid., 7.

18 Michael Carter, “Pearl Primus Dances Out Social Problems: Entertainer Attempts to Contribute to Interracial Understanding; Tours South to Study Actions in Church,” Baltimore Afro-American, 22 July1944, 5.

19 Langston Hughes, “The Underground,” New Masses 48.13 (1943): 14.

20 Lois Balcom, “What Chance Has the Negro Dancer?” Dance Observer 11.9 (1944): 110–11; Earl Conrad, “Pearl Primus Tells Her Faith in Common People,” Chicago Defender, 6 January 1945.

21 Dayo F. Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War (New York: NYU Press, 2011), 37.

22 Goodman, “Hard Time Blues,” 31.

23 See Manning, Modern Dance, Negro Dance, 159.

24 Carter, “Pearl Primus Dances Out Social Problems.”

25 Ibid.

26 D. Soyini Madison, Performed Ethnography and Communication: Improvisation and Embodied Experience (New York: Routledge, 2018), xviii.

27 Rebecca R. Kastleman, “Staging Hurston's Heaven: Ethnographic Performance from the Pulpit to the Pews,” Theatre Survey 63.2 (2022): 138–59; Anthea Kraut, Choreographing the Folk: The Dance Stagings of Zora Neale Hurston (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

28 VèVè A. Clark, “Performing the Memory of Difference in Afro-Caribbean Dance: Katherine Dunham's Choreography, 1938–87,” in History and Memory in African-American Culture, ed. Geneviève Fabre and Robert O'Meally (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 188–204, at 189. See also VèVè A. Clark, “Developing Diasporic Literacy and Marasa Consciousness,” Theatre Survey 50.1 (2009): 9–18.

29 Joanna Dee Das, Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

30 Carter, “Pearl Primus Dances Out Social Problems.”

31 Goodman, “Hard Time Blues,” 55.

32 Schwartz and Schwartz, Dance Claimed Me, 113.

33 Erik S. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 129.

34 Schwartz and Schwartz, Dance Claimed Me, 113.

35 Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads, 4.

36 Schwartz and Schwartz, Dance Claimed Me, 113.

37 Dier, “Interview with La Primus.”

38 Ibid.

39 Primus, “Diary by Pearl Primus, 1943–1949,” December 1946.

40 Ibid.; Dier, “Interview with La Primus.”

41 Primus, “Diary by Pearl Primus, 1943–1949,” December 1946.

42 Dier, “Interview with La Primus”; Goodman, “Hard Time Blues,” 56.

43 Dier, “Interview with La Primus.

44 Ibid.

45 Peter Lau, “Southern Negro Youth Congress,” Oxford African American Studies Center (1 December 2006); https://doi.org/10.1093/acref/9780195301731.013.43473, accessed 5 May 2023.

46 McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom, 141–2.

47 Ibid., 142. SNYC's original headquarters had been in Richmond, Virginia. It moved to Birmingham, Alabama, in 1940.

48 Ibid., 141.

49 Dier, “Interview with La Primus.”

50 Tanisha C. Ford, Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon and the Glamour, Money, and Power Behind the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Amistad/HarperCollins, 2023), 64.

51 Conrad, “Pearl Primus.”

52 Penny M. Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 3.

53 Goodman, “Hard Time Blues,” 55.

54 Dier, “Interview with La Primus.”

55 For example, see Ford, Our Secret Society, 210.

56 Dier, “Interview with La Primus.”

57 Vickie Thompson, “Pearl Primus Dancers’ Feet Infected, Declares Tour's ‘Grossly Mishandled’: Production Drags; Dancer Plans Suit,” New York Amsterdam News, 10 February 1945, B5.

58 Nadine George-Graves, “African American Performance and Community Engagement,” in The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre, ed. Harvey Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 196–214, at 198.

59 For examples, see Martha Coleman, “On the Teaching of Choreography: Interview with Jean Erdman,” Dance Observer 19.4 (1952): 52–3; Jean Erdman, “The Dance as Non-Verbal Poetic Image, Part I,” Dance Observer 16.4 (1949): 48–9; Jean Erdman, “Young Dancers State Their Views: As Told to Joseph Campbell,” Dance Observer 15.4 (1948): 40–1; Jean Erdman, “What Is Modern Dance?” Vassar Alumnae Magazine (February 1948): 19–25; Robert Horan, “Poverty and Poetry in Dance,” Dance Observer 11.5 (1944): 52–4, 59; Gertrude Lippincott, “Will Modern Dance Become Legend?” Dance Magazine 21.11 (1947): 24–7, 40; John Martin, “A Crisis in the Dance,” American Scholar 9.1 (1939–40): 115–20; “‘Modern’ Dance Devotees Present Concerts Heedless of Any Profit,” New York Herald Tribune, 6 November 1949, C2.

60 Pearl Primus, “Living Dance of Africa,” Dance Magazine 20.6 (1946): 14–15, 45–7, at 15.

61 Ibid.

62 See John Martin, The Modern Dance (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1933).

63 Primus, “Living Dance of Africa,” 15.

64 Friedman, “Hidden in Plain Sight,” 102–5.

65 Schwartz and Schwartz, Dance Claimed Me, 95, 270.

66 Quoted in ibid., 148.

67 Ibid., 145–6.