Pearl Primus; Dance Pioneer

Pearl Primus, pioneer of the anthropological modern dance movement who brought dances rooted in Africa and the Caribbean to American audiences and students, has died. She was 74.

Ms. Primus died Saturday at her home in New Rochelle, N.Y., after a brief illness.

One of her best known works was “Strange Fruit,” which she created in 1943, using lyricist Lewis Allan’s poem of that title as a narrative.

At a presentation of the dance at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art this year, Times critic Lewis Segal commented: “ ‘Strange Fruit’ showed choreographer Pearl Primus many decades ahead of her time in linking a spoken text and a gestural, non-dance vocabulary to a social theme--murderous racism.”

Ms. Primus continued to perform until 1980, and taught throughout the United States until her death. Among her many university appointments, she was the chancellor’s distinguished lecturer in fine arts at UC Irvine.

“Dance is my language,” she said at Irvine in 1990. “I started to dance not to entertain, but to help people better understand each other. 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.”

Born in Trinidad in the British West Indies, Ms. Primus was raised in the United States.

She earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Hunter College, intending to become a doctor. But she found no laboratory jobs available to African Americans, so she applied to the Depression-era National Youth Administration, which put her in the New Dance Group Studio.

She became a cabaret dancer at the racially integrated Cafe Society in New York.

Study trips to Africa altered her dancing. In the 1940s she began combining anthropologically analyzed movements with modern dance.

She also earned a doctorate in anthropology from New York University.

She married Percival Borde, a dancer she met in 1953 during a visit home to Trinidad. He died in 1979.

In 1991, she earned the National Medal of the Arts, the highest accolade for performers in her adopted United States.

She is survived by one son, Onwin Borde, of Miami.