Learn more about Pearl Primus and her work.

Africa Diaries (2004) refers to the trips to Africa that Primus took, beginning in 1948, to conduct the anthropological research.

Southern Diaries (2005) refers to the trip which Primus made during the summer of 1944 to live and work with poor migrant workers in the rural South. In Southern Diaries, Zollar incorporates reconstructions of Strange Fruit and Hard Time Blues with her own choreography, creating a theatrical continuum between two generations of modern dance artists.

Classroom Activities

Read: Read John Perpener’s article on Jawole Willa Jo Zollar.

Expand: How does the search for identity—as well as social and political protest—continue to be a concern among artists today?

Watch: View Zollar’s Walking with Pearl. Remind students that in observing dance, they should be looking for ways the choreographer creates meaning through gestures, images, and connections to literature, other dances, and every day life. Use the Movement Analysis Worksheet.

Write: Allow students to free-write (3 minutes) their responses to the dance, especially writing descriptions of the dance. Afterward, ask writers to harvest verbs from their responses. Read the verbs aloud as a list. Ask students to use these verbs to write a poem or descriptive paragraph about Walking With Pearl. Ask students to share their writings in small groups.

Discuss:

• Identify differences and similarities among the works by Martha Graham, Pearl Primus, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar.
• Zollar’s work makes deliberate use of Primus’s words and dances. Discuss the impact of this borrowing. Think of additional artists who refer to other artists’ works in making new work.
• How have conditions facing African-American women changed from Primus’s time to Zollar’s time? What are some of the things that have remained the same?

Move: Research a dance form practiced by members of their family and/or community and learn steps from the dance. This material will become the basis for creating your own dance.

Classroom Activities

Watch: View Strange Fruit and Hard Time Blues. Ask students to observe with the following in mind: What movement elements do you see in the dances: spatial patterns (for example, straight line, circular, rectangular, lines at right angles), body shapes, and different movement qualities, i.e. light/strong, fast/slow, direct/indirect? How does Primus express themes of social commentary and protest in her work? What gestures does she use?  How do the movement elements support the meanings of these dances?

Discuss: What do Primus’s dances tell us about 1940s America?  Comment on the irony of Americans fighting to liberate Europeans during World War II, while racism continued in America.

Compare: Can you isolate and describe the differences between Primus’s and Graham’s dance expressions of social commentary and protest themes?

Move: Set up a movement experience that allows students to explore gestures and movement qualities present in Primus’s work and that students might relate to contemporary protest. This might be done through a technique class, improvisation, or dance making experience.

Read: Read the information on Pearl Primus from Margaret Lloyd’s chapter “New Leaders—New Directions” from The Borzoi Book of Modern Dance. Do some research on America in the 1940s and list some events important to African Americans in the 1940s.

Expand: Can you think of examples of social commentary and protest as reflected in popular culture today? Bring in examples of contemporary artists who use details from their lives—their experiences, their travels, their personal relationships—as inspiration for the creation of their music, visual art, literature and poetry, or dance.

Connect: You might also create a project that asks students to interview senior members of their community and collect oral histories of the Great Depression.

Research: Find American literature that reflects themes of social and political protest. Poetry is a good choice to focus on since that is the literary form Primus drew upon to inspire several of her dances.

Like Langston Hughes’s poem, Pearl Primus’s The Negro Speaks of Rivers is a meditation on the African diaspora. Primus’s dance evokes a sense of connection, pride, and strength among peoples of African descent. Students will identify the movements and gestures that help capture the choreographer’s ideas.

Classroom Activities

Discuss: Ask students for their impressions about Primus’s life in New York in the 1930 and 1940s. Primus was both from Trinidad and identified as an African American. How would her experience be different than Graham’s?

Watch: View Primus’s 1944 solo, The Negro Speaks of Rivers. Write down initial impressions of the dance and answer the following: What kinds of movements did Primus use in order to capture the images in Hughes’s poem? What kinds of movements did Primus use to create her vision of an American identity? Watch The Negro Speaks of Rivers again using the Movement Analysis Worksheet. Look to identify spatial patterns (for example: straight line, circular, rectangular, lines at right angles), body shapes, and different movement qualities, i.e. light/strong, fast/slow, direct/indirect.

Discuss: 

• Compare and contrast the two ways of observing dance—looking for movement in relationship to meaning and looking for compositional movement elements (floor patterns, shapes, etc).  How do these ways of seeing differ and lead you to different aspects of dance?  How are they complementary?
• Describe some of the images you found incorporating words from the Movement Analysis exercise.
• How is this dance like and different from Frontier?
• What are some of the dance movements and everyday gestures that we associate with African American identity today?
• What are some of the ways that a single ethnic group’s movement patterns become a part of the lives of all Americans?

Write: After reading the chapter on Pearl Primus from John O. Perpener’s African-American Concert Dance: The Harlem Renaissance and Beyond, Langston Hughes’s poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” and Pearl Primus’s “My Statement,” write down ideas about what life might have been like for Primus growing up in the United States in the 1930s. If you need to, do a little research about America in the 1930s, especially the Harlem Renaissance.

Expand: Research the Great Depression. Be sure to look at photographs taken during this period, for example images by photographers Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. How would you describe the people in these photographs?

Who is an American? This question has been redefined throughout United States history. In the 16th century, an American was someone we would now call Native American. In the 17th century, Americans came to be people of European birth or ancestry living in the New World, especially people whose roots were in the British Isles. This idea persisted during the American Civil War (1861-1865), even as Americans split into Union and Confederacy over slavery, states rights, and economic disparity, and into the twentieth century. In his essay, “Who is an American? The Imagined Community in American History,” historian Eric Foner describes how America took on a more pluralistic definition in the 1930s and 40s:

Despite broad acceptance among intellectuals, the celebration of diversity remained a minority point of view until World War II, when it suddenly emerged as the official definition of American nationhood. The way, to be sure, had already been paved during the New Deal by the resurgent union movement and the broad left-wing culture of the Popular Front era. The Congress of Industrial Organizations mobilized ethnically divided industrial workers into a self-conscious class with a broad social definition of citizenship and an emphasis on pluralism and inclusiveness as the American way. Meanwhile, left-wing artists and intellectuals advanced a new conception of America as a multi-ethnic, pluralist nation that included blacks. (91)

As Foner discusses, Americans began to expand their ideas about American identity in the 1940s during World War II. Confronted with Nazi Aryanism, Americans could no longer keep up their own race-based definitions of national identity. New immigrants from southern and eastern Europe became Italian Americans or Polish Americans and were considered part of white America. The status of African Americans reemerged, for the first time since Reconstruction, as a subject of national debate. Quotas for Asian immigrants were readjusted, although minimally. Foner states, “As the ethnic understanding of Americanism was discredited, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt explicitly committed the nation to the civil definition. To be an American, he insisted, had always been a ‘matter of mind and heart’ and ‘never was a matter of race or ancestry’” (91).

Contemporary Viewpoints

In the 21st century, we may again reconsider American identity, especially in response to changing structures of international trade, growing economies in South America, and increasing numbers of United States citizens with roots in Latin America. We may learn to see ourselves as North Americans, to identify ourselves geographically in relationship to people living in Central and South America, or come to see Americans as people living across the Americas.

Today, we see American identities as questions of birth, choice, and conscience. United States citizens are people born of citizens, whether in the U.S. or abroad, or who seek the process of naturalization, but many more people live within the borders of the United States. This makes for a broad range of people, with varying ties to America, who contribute to our economy, to our shared values and considerations about education and public life, and (as anyone who attends a community arts festival or surveys a range of cable television channels can tell you), to our expressive culture. That does not mean we all feel equally American. We all entertain questions of conscience: Do I embrace the current choices of the government? Do I aspire to the American dream? Do I feel part of or do others identify me with marginalized or empowered social, economic, ethnic, political, or religious groups? Do I feel free to redefine myself?

National and international events might shake Americans into defending or redefining ideas about who Americans are and what Americans stand for. The closing of American textile and auto plants as jobs are moved overseas, the tragedies of September 11, 2001, and military involvements in the Middle East, for example, have inspired patriotism in some and jingoism in others. Taking on an American identity implies self definition, but also a willingness to define others, to determine who is in and out of the “we” circle. Everyday performances—wearing or displaying the American flag, wearing or taking off an Islamic headscarf, contradancing or Sufi dancing—are important means of affirming old and learning new American identities.

Artistic expression is a vital part of public discourse about American identities. Modern dancer and choreographer Martha Graham approached works like Frontier, which explores the feelings of pride and trepidation that were part of westward expansion, from the vantage point of an American who could trace her family back to Miles Standish. Pearl Primus, who came to the United States from Trinidad at age two and who came to identify as African American, made works like The Negro Speaks of Rivers from her understanding of the African diaspora. In the works we explore in this unit, we glimpse the poverty and dislocation that characterized the Depression, the Dustbowl, and the post-Civil War American South and revisit debates over slavery and racism that spanned nineteenth and twentieth-century America. We read and hear the works of poets and musicians of the Harlem Renaissance such as Langston Hughes and Waring Cuney. We realize the changing status of women as public figures in American life. Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, with her works Walking with Pearl … Africa Diaries and Walking with Pearl … Southern Diaries, brings the arts as public discourse about identity into the present and again affirms the importance of history to how we think about ourselves.

Foner, Eric. 1998. “Who Is an American.” In Race, Class, and Gender in the United States: An Integrated Study. Edited by Paula S. Rothenberg. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Next Section: The Search for Identity Through Movement: Martha Graham’s Frontier