Urban Bush Women, Celebrating Pearl Primus's 'Unquenched Fire'

None of the dancers is like another, but the Urban Bush Women share an amazingly fluid movement style. (Photos By Carol Pratt)

Asked why she devoted herself and her company to creating not just one but two tributes to dance anthropologist Pearl Primus -- a seminal chronicler of rites and injustices, about whom we don't hear much anymore -- choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zollar had a simple answer.

"I wanted to connect my heart to her heart, artistically," she said, speaking to the audience after the stirring performance of her troupe, the Urban Bush Women, Friday night at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater. The Bush Women had danced "Walking With Pearl . . . Africa Diaries" and "Walking With Pearl . . . Southern Diaries," each of which linked Primus's words, culled from her extensive writings, and Zollar's choreography.

The words, spoken in voice-over or, in "Africa Diaries," by Zollar herself, were so impassioned and incisive, and the emotionally rich dancing so compatible, that the works truly felt like a meeting of the minds -- and hearts -- of two extraordinary women.

Zollar said she never met Primus, who, like the better-known Katherine Dunham, started out as a dancer fascinated by ancient traditions. Primus eventually traveled throughout the African Diaspora to bring back native dances, which she performed in the 1940s and '50s in New York nightclubs and on Broadway.

Unlike Dunham, however, Primus had a taste for the provocative and politically charged. After spending time in the American South, she created dance versions of social protest in works about lynchings and the life of a sharecropper. She died in 1994 -- not long after making her own trip to the Kennedy Center, presiding over a memorable program of revivals.

What was most impressive about Zollar's homage to the dance pioneer was its fresh, living quality. This was no dry lecture-demonstration about a historical figure, but rather a work of art whose power derived from Zollar's keen ability to trigger emotions with the right mix of words and movement.

Her troupe is all about quality of movement. None of the eight dancers is like another, yet they share -- to an eerie degree -- a way of dancing that is like seaweed in a tide pool, fluid and soft but with a rock-solid foundation. They gulp space with the overhead swish of a leg or with winging arms. The movement is huge, full-bodied and effortless.

In "Africa Diaries," Zollar's choreography bore the shape of African dance -- the widespread arms, doubled-over postures and pumping knees -- but she had softened the edges. There was a cottony quality to the dancing, with smooth transitions and endless echoes of movement throughout the body.

Zollar herself set the tone by walking across the stage at the outset, except it was more like floating and rippling than simply walking. You could have sworn she was moving through water. We saw her dance for only a few short moments, however; for the rest of the time, she perched on a stool and read Primus's words as her company swept across the stage.

You couldn't take your eyes off tall, bald Zimbabwean dancer Nora Chipaumire, especially -- she moved with a kind of majestic stretch, particularly in her super-flexible shoulders. Lots of dancers draw attention with their legs, but this woman sucked you in with how she could flutter her arms like silk.

The music was just as light and evocative, with delicate string compositions by New Ancient Strings and a lilting traditional Zimbabwean song.

Primus's words ranged from the lyrical ("In the dance I have . . . slipped through the boundaries of time and space") to such bold, ahead-of-her-time assertions as labeling dance "a vital part of the great heritage of all mankind." She could also be polemical, fiercely describing dance as a way to fight the ravages of racism.

The piece ended on a resonant note: "My body still dances with the unquenched fire that is Africa."

What the dancers accomplished so compellingly in "Africa Diaries" was to conjure a culture without play-acting; it was all atmosphere and feeling. "Southern Diaries" did not get the balance quite right. There were times in this piece when acting -- rather, overacting -- reached a distracting level. Efforts to tell a story or set a scene did not play to the group's strengths, which were firmly in the area of dancing rather than drama.

"Southern Diaries" had quite a different look from the first piece; it was heavier, more muscular and percussive. In it, one of Primus's most famous works, "Hard Time Blues," accompanied by a recording of blues and folk singer Josh White's "Hard Times," was re-created, full of punishingly vigorous jumps. That was the strongest section of the work.

Elsewhere, Zollar got tangled up in wishing to expand upon Primus's vivid accounts of brutality and hardship, and she forgot to rely on her acute dance instincts. Yet the evening left one to wonder: What might have resulted if these two like-minded women had met?