Genuine Africa

Pearl Primus is a stocky, powerhouse dancer who has always tried to "express the culture of the Negro people." Until she went to Africa two years ago to study Negro dancing at its source, she always felt she was just "experimenting." Now, says Pearl, "when I put my feet down, I am putting my feet down, and the audiences know it."

In Greenwich Village's Cafe Society last week, she gave her nightclub fans a prayer dance first. "That makes the audience think 'Here is a person who is serious,' " Pearl says. "Once I show them my dignified side, I can be as wild as I feel." When she got down to the "strength" and "fertility" dances, her thrusting, thumping power, matched to the savage beat of a hand-patted African drum, was wild enough to stand the customer's hair on end. It was all certified genuine: "Everything I do is consistent with what I saw in Africa -- except for wearing a bra. I have to make that concession to our modern standards."

In all, Pearl spent more than a year visiting 30 tribes -- in the Gold Coast, the Belgian Congo, French Equatorial Africa and Nigeria. In western Nigeria, the Yoruba tribe named her "Omowale," or "child has returned home." She took part in stately court and social dances, was taught the ceremonials of puberty and hunting.

The primary lesson she learned: "To them the earth is the source of life. The ground is like the dynamo of life; once you make contact with it your torso becomes an electric conductor." The role of the dancer: to "take the solidness of the earth and transform it into the spirit of the sky."

Pearl, 31, now varies her nightclub routine with teaching (and working at Columbia University on her Ph. D. thesis in anthropology, to be published by Mac-millan). She would like to do a whole "dance-play," has hopes of getting such a play produced on Broadway next year. With "actors trained by me," she would try to accomplish a threefold ambition: "To speak as an individual, to portray the spirit of Africa, and to do it through the African dance idiom."

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