Force From Within Powers Dancer in Culture Jubilee : Performance: 71-year-old artist speaks of the heritage of peoples of African descent, their dignity, beauty and strength, through dance.

A small, plump figure wrapped in brightly colored print fabric, her arms loaded with silver and ivory bangles, Pearl E. Primus is a force to be reckoned with: grand and humorous, learned and girlish.

At 71, the dancer-choreographer-anthropologist has long been known for her pioneer work in documenting, preserving and celebrating African and African-American culture. Her hefty resume is filled with lists of awards and honors. Yet she’s not above taking an earthy pleasure in sashaying around on a makeshift stage to the teasingly insistent drumming of her son-the-musician.

Appointed the Chancellor’s Distinguished Lecturer in Fine Arts at UC Irvine, Primus gave a public lecture Wednesday evening in the university’s Physical Sciences Hall.

“Dance is my language,” she declaimed, folding her arms majestically. Then she recounted how she talked her faculty advisers into counting dance as one of the two foreign languages she needed to fulfill her Ph.D. requirements in educational sociology and anthropology at New York University.

“I started to dance not to entertain, but to help people better understand each other,” she said, back in her effortlessly eloquent mode. “I wanted to speak of the heritage of peoples of African descent, their dignity, beauty and strength. . . I used the dance to fight racism, to fight ignorance where I found it. . . . I had to have my facts--that is why I delved into anthropology. Dance was my teacher.”

Years ago, she went to the American South “to feel the earth beneath my feet” in the cotton fields. “In Alabama, I said I was from Georgia; in Georgia, I said I was from Tennessee. . . .”

Primus, whose accent gives her away as a New Yorker, knew it was impossible to disguise her background. (“There is a different twang, a different tempo to one’s walk from place to place.”) But she learned the folk tales and the dances, and experienced firsthand the life of coping with Jim Crow laws.

She showed a group of slides of some of the drums and masks she has brought back from Africa. “My technique was formed from the great sculpture of Africa,” she said, drawing attention to its “strong, jutting forms” and “fullness.” She used to imagine herself as the sculpture: Suppose she assumed the same positions--how would she move?

One slide was of a sculpture of the head of a woman with full lips, a broad nose and large, protruding eyes. When it was shown in a museum, Primus said, an official called her in anguish.

“We’re busing black children to show them their great heritage and they snicker and hang their heads,” the official lamented.

“How do you expect a child taught no respect of his culture to see beauty here?” she replied. “What else have you said? What else have you shown them? There’s no use saying Picasso used these as models--they don’t know who Picasso is.”

And then came the images of Primus in her brilliantly vivacious prime, shot by Barbara Morgan and other noted dance photographers. There was the young, modern-dance trained woman with her upturned, ecstatic face and powerful thighs pushing through space in “African Ceremonial,” or catching her skirt under the toes of one foot as she whirled off the ground in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” after a poem by Langston Hughes.

“I loved the air,” she said happily. “I thought the plie (a squatting dance movement) was a shout from the earth.”

So where did her dances come from? From research into the experiences of black people. In Cuba, for example, slave overseers--who reported to absentee masters--were likely to lose their jobs if the number of slaves diminished over the course of a year. Slaves were chained together so nobody would run away. Walking in chains was a step-and-pull movement, as Primus demonstrated.

In American black churches, she said, a preacher would stretch up one hand to receive a blessing from the creator and extend the other arm to comfort and bless his flock. She showed a slide of a dancer imbuing these simple gestures with fervid power.

Today’s speedy, superficial world dismays Primus. (At one point during her talk, she said: “I could go on forever. But in our country you can’t go on forever. You can’t go beyond 10 minutes beyond how long you said you’d be.”) Dancers today “don’t have the inner time,” she said. “They don’t have the depth of wanting to understand what the earth is, what the sky is.”

Although plagued with slide projector malfunction and noisy children in the audience, the lecture took on the feel of a revival meeting, with numerous murmured assents from black students in the audience.

When Primus finished speaking, her son, Onwin Babajide Primus Borde, threw himself into a round of passionate drumming that didn’t end until the stage was filled with shaking, swaying dance department faculty and students--including choreographer Donald McKayle, Primus’ former student, who bowed at her feet before stepping back to join suavely in the dance.