Dances of Sorrow, Dances of Hope : The work of Pearl Primus finds a natural place in a special program of historic modern dances for women. Primus’ 1943 work ‘Strange Fruit’ leaped over the boundaries of what was then considered ‘black dance’

Southern trees bear a strange fruit Blood on the leaves and blood at the root Black body swinging in the Southern breeze Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees . . .

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It’s a fine day in New York in the wartime 1940s, and choreographer Pearl Primus is discussing poetry over lunch with blues singer Billie Holiday and lyricist Lewis Allan. Allan is chattering with animation about his poem “Strange Fruit,” reciting lines Holiday herself has made famous in her baleful vocal rendition of the poem and which Primus, separately, has incorporated as the narration for a dance.

Having been silent through much of the lunch, Holiday finally reveals herself through the stricken expression that has spread across her face. And then it dawns on Primus that, until this very moment, Holiday has known nothing of what the poem is about, certainly not that it evokes the pain of African Americans in an era when lynching was still considered by some as appropriate for an “uppity” black.

“ ‘What do you think it’s talking about?’ ” an incredulous Primus recalls asking Holiday, who was four years her senior and whom she considered both a mentor and a friend. “Of course, Lewis Allan just laughed. Black body swaying in the Southern breeze. Billie just didn’t get that. You never heard of Billie having anything to do with any protest. That was not part of her.”

Holiday may have been naive about the meaning of Allan’s poem. But the same could not be said of Primus nor of those second-generation modern dance choreographers of the 1930s and ‘40s whose work will be featured this week in a program titled “Weeping Women in Dance: Classic American Solos” at the Leo S. Bing Theater of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The program is being organized by Bonnie Oda Homsey as a project of the newly revived Los Angeles Dance Theatre.

Seven solos will be featured in performances by Homsey, company co-director Janet Eilber, former Jose Limon soloist Risa Steinberg and Cal State Long Beach dance faculty member Michele Simmons.

Martha Graham’s 1937 “Deep Song” is a scream of protest against the fascists in Spain. It has been called Graham’s “Weeping Woman,” a reference to the Picasso painting of 1937 that forms the centerpiece of LACMA’s current gallery show.

Jane Dudley’s 1944 “Cante Flamenco” is an homage to the women’s movement that arose during the Spanish Civil War. Eleanor King’s “Wrath” deals with the violent rage that accompanied the start of World War II. And Anna Sokolow’s “Kaddish,” created in 1948, at war’s end, is built upon the traditional Jewish prayer of mourning. (Earlier works of anger and grief--Isadora Duncan’s 1907 “Furies” and Graham’s 1930 “Lamentation”--will also be performed.)

Primus is arguably the most political choreographer of the lot, or, at the very least, the most attuned to the issues of African Americans during the period between the two world wars. The year 1943 witnessed not only her performance debut but the creation of more than a dozen new works.

Many of those works concerned the problems of poor blacks. In “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” based on the Langston Hughes poem, Primus depicts the plight of post-slavery African Americans working in chain gangs or in the cotton fields. “Jim Crow Train,” from another Hughes poem, “Freedom Train,” deals with segregation:

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I hope there ain’t no Jim Crow on the Freedom Train

No back door entrance to the Freedom Train,

No signs FOR COLORED on the Freedom Train,

No WHITE FOLKS ONLY on the Freedom Train.

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In addition to a number of legendary dances that celebrated African heritage, Primus produced other dances of social concern as well, notably “Slave Market” (1944), “To One Dead” (1946) and a dance based on a spiritual, “Michael Row the Boat Ashore” (1946).

None, however, was as searing as the 1943 “Strange Fruit,” which depicts the anguish of a white woman who had witnessed a lynching and who subsequently was filled with regret. And no dance was as radical in extending the boundaries of what was considered to be “black dance,” for in “Strange Fruit,” Primus danced the role of the white woman herself.

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At 74, Primus appears so energized in rehearsal that it is easy to imagine her dancing “Strange Fruit” again, right now, on command. At the side of the rehearsal studio at Scripps College in Altadena, she sits squarely in a folding chair, shoes off, her body wrapped in volumes of green-and-maroon African textiles that make her small form seem much larger than it is. Only the gnarled hands with which she directs dancer Michele Simmons convey any sense of age or infirmity.

“You have to ‘earth’ that run more,” she exhorts Simmons, who is struggling not only to learn the steps from a videotaped performance by Kim Y. Bears, a dancer with the Philadelphia-based Philadanco dance company, but to anchor them with the firm, grounded quality Primus prefers. (Etymologists take note: Primus may be the only choreographer in America to use earth as a verb.)

Indeed, with her head swathed in a turban and her arms and ears jangling with silver earrings and bangles, Primus easily resembles central casting’s image of the African earth mother. It’s a role she embodies without embarrassment.

Once, at the American Dance Festival, she mentions after rehearsal, she ran into Chuck Davis, artistic director of the African American Dance Ensemble, along with a class of young students. “Here are your grandchildren,” he told her. And with little more than a wave from him, all the students in the class prostrated themselves in homage.

Primus invited Simmons to call her Nma , a word which, in the Efik language of Kalabar, Nigeria, means “mother who did not birth you.”

And from the style of this rehearsal, it is clear that the transmission of fundamental imagery and accumulated knowledge is even more important to Primus than simply repeating the steps. She is obsessed with details. “Remember what I said about the toes: They’re like antelope hoofs,” she says, laughing a bit at the absurd quality of that image.

Gestures are likened to the crawling motion of “miserable insects,” a tendrilling hand is a “serpent,” and the fateful lynching tree--invisible to the audience--is conjured as a part of the dancer’s body. “Remember,” says Primus, “the legs are the roots of the tree, growing out of the earth.”

It takes more than an hour to chisel 30 seconds of choreography. Later, Simmons says that this glacially slow process is revelatory:

“At the first rehearsal, (Primus) said, ‘Come, come,’ and had me sit right at her feet. She talked to me for 2 1/2 hours about what this piece was about, about the outrage she and people like Adam Clayton Powell Sr. and Paul Robeson felt when they heard about the lynchings of African Americans in the South in the early 1940s. It was beyond what they could imagine. She said that was what inspired her to do this dance.”

Certainly the spectator does not need to be told that “Strange Fruit” is an exploration of one woman’s reaction to a lynching. But is the woman a relation of the hanged man? A friend? A lover?

None of the above, Primus told critic Margaret Lloyd in the late 1940s. The woman is a member of the mob, “screaming and shouting in animal fury with the rest.” Writes Lloyd: “It is noteworthy that (Primus) identifies herself with a white person and has the acumen to see, even in a lynch mob, the possibility of remorse.”

Says Simmons: “The woman was with a group of people who had been picnicking when the lynching occurred. And as she leaves the area, something makes her turn back and confront what has happened. ‘What is this? This is not right,’ she says.”

But the piece is not fundamentally or exclusively angry, says Simmons. “It’s more a question: What have we done to allow ourselves to get to this place?”

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When asked how she came to make such politically charged pieces at the tender age of 24, Primus is a bit stymied. “It was like a mandate,” she says. “It was something I had to do. . . . I was given a body strong enough, I was given the schooling, I was given the people (to help me) and the dreams. And this is the work I was meant to do: to show the dignity, beauty and strength in the heritage of peoples of African ancestry.

“I didn’t choose to dance about a flower or a running brook or something. I chose to answer the ills of society with the language of dance.”

Born in Trinidad, the granddaughter of a Vodoun doctor who could trace his ancestry to the Ashanti in Ghana, Primus moved to New York with her family at the age of 2. In the big city, her father held various odd jobs, from carpenter to seaman, while she, in school, excelled in track and field.

The tremendous jump she developed in sports served her well when, upon graduating from Hunter College, she could not find a job and found herself in the National Youth Administration dance company, first as a wardrobe mistress and then as a reluctant dancer when company member Joe Nash’s partner dropped out in 1939.

Nash, now a prominent New York-based dance historian, was drafted soon after. But in 1943, upon hearing that the New York Times critic John Martin had named Pearl Primus “dance debutante of the year,” he was so shocked that he wrote to Primus to warn her that someone must be using her name.

In between her first forays as an NYA dancer and her anointing by Martin, Primus had fashioned herself as an artist and dancer under the aegis of the politically oriented New Dance Group. Founded in 1932 to bring the uplifting force of dance into the lives of oppressed peoples--especially blacks and Jews--the dance group studio and company allowed Primus to work with Martha Graham followers Jane Dudley and Sophie Maslow.

Modern dance was growing into a dynamic art form. The training was serious. And the concert stage--not the big entertainment venues--quickly became Primus’ highest goal. Later this would distinguish her from Katherine Dunham, the other well-known African American choreographer of the era who became famous in slick revues as well as Hollywood films.

“She took (African and West Indian) culture and theatricalized it,” Primus says, with a slight edge in her voice. “In speaking and dancing truthfully about (these cultures), I was the anthropologist.”

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It is ironic, then, that Primus’ big break came at Cafe Society Downtown, a New York nightclub run by Barney Josephson, where she became the toast of the town in 1943. Critic Edwin Denby wrote three glowing reviews of her dancing at this club over a six-month period.

“She is an unusual dancer and deserves her quick celebrity,” Denby wrote in the New York Herald Tribune, marveling at the height of this small woman’s jumps and the intelligence of her choreography. “All her movement has a native Negro quality--an unction and a spring--that is a great pleasure to watch. In schooling she is a strict ‘modern’; but the personal simplicity of her dances and her clear sense of drama and climax make her numbers easy for any audience to follow. For her best effect she needs a good deal more room that she has on the floor of Cafe Society, but at least she couldn’t find a more attentive nightclub public.”

The public at Cafe Society, as distinguished from venues like the Cotton Club of the 1920s and ‘30s, was decidedly integrated. It was there that Primus met such arts notables as Paul Robeson, Marian Anderson, Hazel Scott, Josh White, James Baldwin, Fats Waller, Mary Lou Williams. And a blues singer named Billie Holiday, who on more than one occasion was at Cafe Society for Primus’ shows, sidled up by the bar.

More than 50 years have gone by since all eyes seemed to turn in Primus’ direction. Since that time she has traveled extensively in Africa on a fellowship from the Rosenwald Foundation; married and toured with her husband, the Trinidad dancer-choreographer Percival Borde (who, she says, is “now with the ancestors”); bore a son, Onwin, who arranges music for many of her pieces; earned a Ph.D. from New York University; taught extensively at the University of Massachusetts.

And she has earned many honorary doctorates and major awards, including the President’s National Medal of Arts in 1991.

How odd it is, then, that very little of Primus’ work has been recorded on film or video. A handful of works have been staged by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, but they are not in the repertory now. The American Dance Festival has funded the re-creation of three early solos, including “Strange Fruit.” But given Primus’ age, there might not be that much time left to reclaim the dances that reside nowhere but in her own body.

Part of the problem is Primus’ reluctance to give her pieces to other dancers, even though she can’t perform them herself any longer.

“I didn’t create ‘Strange Fruit’ for a dancer,” she explains. “I created it to make a statement within our society, within our world. And therefore, it was made with my body. When I danced it, I wasn’t male or female. I wasn’t the wind, I wasn’t a tree. I was a concept.”*

* “Weeping Women in Dance: Classic American Solos,” Leo S. Bing Theater, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. Thursday,, 8:30 p.m., Saturday,, 3 p.m. $15-$18. (213) 480-3232.