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Ned Wayburn [biography]
Dates: 1874-1942
Birth Date: Mar 30, 1874
Death Date: Sep 2, 1942
Place of Birth: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Place of Death: New York, New York
Ned Wayburn, dance director and choreographer, and seminal figure in developing the [tap] dance routine (a structure for solo, team, and chorus performance), was born Edward Claudius Weyburn (his professional name a misspelling of his original surname) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His father Elbert Delos Weyburn was, along with his paternal grandfather, Chauncy Weyburn, an inventor and manufacturer of industrial machinery. As a child, Wayburn lived briefly in Atlanta, Georgia, but spent his adolescence in Chicago where he studied mathematics and mechanical drawing at the Chicago Training School, and had some formal training as a pianist in Atlanta and Chicago. Part of his legend propagated by the choreographer in later life was that he spent much of his adolescence running away from home to work as a call boy in Chicago for the Bijou Opera Company, Chicago Museum, and Olympia Theatre, and was the "Rossiter" in the Hurricane Dutch and Irish Team of Johnson and Rossiter at Middleton's West Side Museum in the same city; and may have been a member of the team of Hafford and Rossiter Character Change Comedians that played at Chicago's Lyceum Theatre in the week beginning 6 January 1893. He was also fascinated with minstrel shows. While working in the family business, the Weyburn Machinery Company, he served as a supernumerary and as an usher at the Chicago Grand Opera House, and later worked at the same theatre as the chief usher and box office manager. At the age of 21, he left the world of manufacturing and took a job as an accompanist and teacher at the Hart Conway School, which offered classes in acting, fencing, gymnastics, and physical culture, as well as presenting student recitals, amateur theatricals and minstrel shows. Professor C.H. Jacobsen, who taught classic (interpretive of neo-Greek) and fancy (ballet) dancing; Colonel T.H. Monstery, who taught fencing and military drills; and Mrs. Ida Simpson-Serven, who lectured on voice and physical culture, especially the Delsartian ideas about the meaning of gestures and their ability to communicate emotion, would all influence Wayburn's growing interest in directing movement onstage.
Wayburn's choreography would later be drawn directly from the Delsartian principles of the laws of inflection, velocity, attitude, precision, and opposition, applying these laws to "aural" dances, especially tap dance work, where the speed and density of sound were vitally important. In practical terms, it meant that the number of separate taps that could be heard by an audience was proportional to the number of performers executing them. Delsarte's law of precision stated that efficient force demanded exactitude of movement and gesture, which for Wayburn became a definition of articulate tapping. Other influences on his choreography would be ballet spectacles, minstrel shows (he would adopt the minstrel parade in almost every dance with more than twelve performers), popular social dances (particularly the cotillion, which was performed to set movements, or figures and included a walking rhythmic march), and drills: all had a major impact on Wayburn's manipulation of groups, his recognition of symmetry as a choreographic theme, and his codification and handling of the routine format.
In 1896 Wayburn left the Conway school with a letter of recommendation for an audition, which led to an engagement on the Keith circuit vaudeville theatres as a blackface "ragtime pianist and monologuist." Billed as the man who invented rag-time, he built his act on the syncopating of familiar classical music pieces, such as Mendelssohn's "Wedding March" from the overture of A Midsummer Night's Dream. On reaching New York, he auditioned for a received a part as "Gregory, the rag-time Butler" in The Swell Miss Fizwell (1897). In 1899, he was hired to perform in, write the music for, and stage By the Sad Sea Waves, which gave him his first experience with a professional chorus line which included the young Gertrude Hoffman, who would become an important dance director and the star of two of his later shows. Wayburn's emergence as a stage director followed quickly for his successful work for The Night of the Fourth (1901). By the 1901-1902 season in New York, he had settled into a schedule of staging a minimum of ten shows a year.
In the winter of 1902-03, Wayburn created Ned Wayburn's Minstrel Misses, a feature act conceived as one single scene in which a chorus of sixteen women marched onstage wearing long coats of fantastic design and collar and military caps hats in a brass marching minstrel parade. The dancers, in full view of the audience, apply black cork makeup, standing at tables set at the rear of the stage, transforming themselves into blackface minstrels sitting in an inverted semi-circle holding tambourines and bones. The style of "minstrel" stepping for this act, (as well as for Ned Wayburn's Girls of 1904, in which the white female chorus transform themselves through the application of darkface makeup into "Dinges" as they dance to Theodore F. Morse's "Dixie" Overture, drew heavily from English and Irish step and clog dancing technique. Photographs of the dancers in Minstrel Misses show the ladies wearing light clogs with split wooden soles. In Girls of 1904, a waltz clog was danced on foot-high pedestals placed on three tiers of platforms. To describe this newly simplified hybrid form, which had its roots in solo and duo clog dancing in vaudeville acts and in marches, Wayburn coined the phrase "tap and stepping." While it is not at all certain that Wayburn, as written in Gerald Bordman's American Musical Theater, "tiring of heavy-footed clog dances, put small metal plates on the bottom of dancers' shoes for a lighter, steelier sound . . . Tap-dancing was born," or that this was the first time that the term "tap dancing" was publicly and professionally used," as Aubrey Haines writes in Dance Digest's "Where the Tap Dance Came From," tap dancing was not the sole invention of Wayburn, who instead was discovering and devising a technical vocabulary and style of (rhythmic) stepping for the chorus that stressed aural precision and exactness in execution.
By 1904 Wayburn was creating feature vaudeville acts. During the first decade of his career he was also working on pantomimes and spectacle shows produced in New York and Chicago, receiving partial staging credit and sharing the title of director, and choreographic responsibilities with the ballet master Ernest d'Auban. Between 1906 and 1913 Wayburn staged a wide variety of shows in New York and Chicago while operating his own management firm, the Headline Vaudeville Production Company, and began a collaboration with the Shubert Brothers, for whom he produced many musical comedies, operettas, and revues, including Mlle. Mischief (1908), The Mimic World (1908), and the first two editions of the Shuberts' Passing Show (1912 and 1913). The Act I finale of the 1913 show called "Capital Steps" featured specialty and chorus dancers performing tap dance and ballet up, down, and across flights of stairs. At the Century Theatre in New York in 1915 he presented his own Town Topics revue. Working with Florenz Ziegfeld as producing director, he staged four editions of the Ziegfeld Midnight Frolics (1915-1919) and four of the Ziegfeld Follies (1916-1919).
From 1919 to 1922, Wayburn concentrated on the codification of his dance technique and the publishing of The Art of Stage Dancing in six editions (1923-1936), in which he based his choreography on six "techniques": musical comedy dance, tap dance and stepping, acrobatics, ballet, toe specialties, and exhibition ballroom dance. Each of these idioms could be used in chorus work or as the basis of an individual specialty act, in which it could be treated in one of several modes (eccentric, normal, acrobatic, or character). In The Art of Stage Dancing, Wayburn described his musical comedy technique as; "a cross between ballet and…tap and step dancing" that combined pretty poses and pirouettes with several different types of kicking steps with soft-shoe tap steps inserted in unexpected places in the phrase to add a pleasing variety and surprise. The basic foot movements included stepping (a single movement performed with the whole foot), dragging, and touching steps in which the weight of the body was shifted to emphasize or accent a beat); musical comedy technique was employed for small groups of precision dancing which Wayburn helped standardize.
Until the mid-1910s, tapping and stepping was considered a solo or duo specialty that, Wayburn believed, had derived from clog dancing in vaudeville acts. According to Wayburn, the transition from individual specialties to chorus techniques of tap dancing began, during the "soldier" numbers that appeared in revues during World War I. Wayburn recognized the advantage of integrating sound into the actual marching of the dancers instead of adding it more conventionally through the percussion section of the orchestra. The particular drawback to en masse stepping, however, was the limited number of dancers who could tap before the sounds became muffled: footwork in tap dance then needed to be further articulated. Wayburn eventually distinguish six different ways that the shoe made contact with the floor. He also incorporated tap steps into other dance idioms, such as modern Americanized ballet, character dance, eccentric dance, ballroom dance, and legomania. Wayburn recommended a number of styles of dancing shoes, several of them were made to accentuate percussive stepping: a stage shoe with extra-flexible shank, a "Mary Jane" type of shoe for tap and step dancing, a split-clog shoe for advanced tap work, and a Russian boot; and a laced heeled-oxford for tap and step dancing.
After The Mimic World (1908) and The Midnight Sons (1909), Wayburn began to devise the female chorus into groups based on height and assigned techniques of dancing: the shortest women, known as "ponies," were taught tap dance work and ballet; the tallest girls were trained to pose decoratively; and the middle-sized groups were "utility" dancers who specialized in musical comedy technique. His chief innovations as a dance director lay in the broad range of technical vocabularies he routinely employed, his revamping of the divisions within the female chorus specialized choreographies for each group, and the performance hierarchy that governed his manipulation of soloists and masses. As a major inventor of the Prolog, which incorporated toe tapping, precision acrobatics, and toe and tap adagio work, and used the chorus as a visual and sonic framing device, he influenced dozens of dance directors and choreographers who would continue to choreograph on the musical theatre stage. Several performers who either worked with or were trained by him became stars in vaudeville, theatre, film, radio and television, and include Adele and Fred Astaire, Gilda Gray, Marilyn Miller, Ann Pennington, Clifton Webb, and Mae West.
During this period he began experimenting with a new theatre genre, the Prolog, a form of live performance designed to introduce a feature film and tour with it. Prologs made their appearance after World War I and were produced on contract from film studios; between 1919 and 1933, Wayburn created Prologs for the era's biggest movie chains: MGM, Paramount-Publix Corporation, the combined Keith, Albee, and Orpheum chains, and Famous Player-Laskey Films. Between 1923 and 1930, when "little shows" were becoming increasingly popular over shows with large chorus numbers, Wayburn, after twenty-five years of nonstop work, staged no complete shows that reached Broadway. According to Fred Astaire, who starred in Wayburn's final Broadway show, Smiles (1930), the musical was actually a "doctoring job" done as a favor for Ziegfeld. Wayburn nevertheless continued to stage many new shows (school recitals, Prologs, college club performances, industrial shows). His retirement from Broadway did not end his theatrical career as his studios remained going concerns, with a shift in the curriculum from straight dance to a combination of dance, radio and film acting, and singing.
As a dance director, Wayburn staged more than 200 vaudeville acts, as well as 300 musical spectacles for such producers as Oscar and William Hammerstein, the Shubert Brothers, Lew Fields, and Florenz Ziegfeld. His New York school of dance trained many of the top performers including Fred and Adele Astaire (whose later style was based on the training and tutelage of the Wayburn system of dance (it was Wayburn who supposedly convinced Astaire to give up ballet and become a tap dancer) and Eddie Cantor, Al Jolson , W.C. Fields, Marilyn Miller, Marion Davies, Ann Pennington, Will Rogers, Vivienne Segal, and no fewer that 122 other stars. Like John Tiller, Wayburn's style stressed precision and exactness in execution. He created the so-called Ziegfeld Walk for Ziegfeld's chorus girls so they negociate the many staircases they had to traverse in musical staging. Wayburn's use of geometric patterns, best seen from overhead, predated Busby Berkeley's overhead shooting and geometric designs for musical films in the 1930s.
[Sources: Ned Wayburn, The Art of Stage Dancing (1923); Barbara Cohan Stratyner, Ned Wayburn and the Dance Routine: From Vaudeville to the Ziegfeld Follies, Studies in Dance History, No. 13, Society of Dance History Scholars (1996) offers the most complete monograph on the life and career of Wayburn; Barbara Naomi Cohen, "Chain Prologs: Dance at the Picture Palaces." Dance Scope (Fall 1978, pp.12-23)]