The Dance Claimed Me: A Biography of Pearl Primus (review)

Choreographer Pearl Primus (1919–1994) was a key figure in the development of American concert dance. Her dances of social protest, most notably Strange Fruit (1943) and Hard Time Blues (1943), caught the attention of critics, audiences, and political activists. Her choreographic vocabulary, which emphasized dynamic movement and gravity-defying jumps, brought a new aesthetic to modern dance. Though others such as Asadata Dafora had come before her, Primus was largely responsible for introducing West African dance to American audiences. Because of the multiple contributions Primus made, almost all books that survey twentieth-century dance at least mention her. Despite Primus’s importance, however, The Dance Claimed Me: A Biography of Pearl Primus, by Peggy and Murray Schwartz, is the first published book about the choreographer.¹

The authors argue that the story of Primus’s life, a “life filled with passion, drama, determination, fearlessness, and brilliance,” has yet to be told (1, 9). The existing scholarship, such as Richard C. Green’s “(Up)Staging the Primitive: Pearl Primus and ’the Negro Problem’ in American Dance” (2002), they believe, fails to capture the multiple worlds in which she circulated or to reach “those unschooled in academic vocabularies” (289, note 2)—a group of readers they hope to attract with this biography.

Part of the dearth of scholarship has to do with the lack of available sources. The Pearl Primus Collection at Duke University only became fully indexed and available to the public in 2004, but more importantly, Peggy and Murray Schwartz have many of Primus’s papers in their private collection. The Dance Claimed Me is a highly personal biography, and the authors reveal, in their introduction and elsewhere throughout the book, the nature of their close relationship to the choreographer. One can sense the deep love that guides the writers as they set out to tell the story of Primus’s life.

Despite the stated intention to write for a nonacademic audience, The Dance Claimed Me makes a major contribution to dance studies by providing an accurate and specific chronology of Primus’s life. This book explores heretofore little-discussed dimensions of the choreographer’s career that provide exciting avenues for future research. The first two chapters detail the depth of Primus’s involvement with the political Left during the early 1940s, including stories of her experiences as the dance instructor for Camp Wo-Chi-Ca (Worker’s Children’s Camp). The authors’ discussion will certainly enrich scholarship on the relationship between modern dance, “Negro dance,” and the political Left. The second chapter also discusses the main years of Primus’s performing career, from her stellar debut at the 92nd Street Y in 1943 to her national tours to her appearances on Broadway in the revival of Show Boat (1946) and Caribbean Carnival (1947). The Schwartzes argue that Primus saw herself as a modern dancer for whom “the idea that African traditions could be encapsulated and set apart from the central thrust of modern dance aesthetics was alien” (42–3).

With this last claim, the authors insert themselves into one of the major debates in dance scholarship. For the past two decades, scholars have role of African-American choreographers in the history of concert dance in the twentieth century (DeFrantz 2002; Gottschild 1996; Kraut 2008; Manning 2004; Myers 1993; Perpener 2001). In particular, Gerald Myers and others argue that African-American choreographers should be seen as part of the modern dance canon. This inclusive move seeks to erase what Brenda Dixon Gottschild calls the “invisibilization” of black contributions to the aesthetics of both ballet and modern dance (Foulkes 2002; Gottschild 1996; Myers 1993).

Other scholars, such as Susan Manning, argue that the categories “Negro dance” and “modern dance” remained “conceptually distinct” in the mid-twentieth century, and thus any historical study must acknowledge how the imposed division differentially shaped the experiences of black...