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Ada Overton Walker [biography]
Dates: 1880-1914
Birth Date: Feb 14, 1880
Death Date: Oct 11, 1914
Place of Birth: New York, New York
Place of Death: New York, New York
Ada Overton Walker, buck-and-wing and cakewalk virtuoso and choreographer regarded as one of the first choreographers on the American stage was born Ada Wilmon Overton on St. Valentines Day in Greenwich Village, New York City, the second child of Pauline Whitfield, a seamstress, and Moses Overton, a waiter. She was a child who seemed to have danced before she walked, fond of dancing ibn the streets with a hurdy-gurdy, until her parents decided she would receive formal dance training from a Mrs. Thorp in midtown Manhattan. Around 1897, after graduating from Thorp's dance school, she toured briefly with Black Patti's Troubadours. A new opportunity came when a girlfriend invited her to model for an advertisement with Bert Williams and George Walker, who had just scored a hit in their vaudeville debut at Koster and Bial's Music Hall. She agreed to model for the ad and subsequently joined the men in the cakewalk finale. She then joined the cast of Octoroons, in which once critic declared of her performance, "I have just observed the greatest girl dancer."
In 1898, Overton rejoined Williams and Walker at Koster and Bial's in the second production of In Gotham with a cast of forty, in a program of songs and dances. With Grace Halliday she then formed the sister act of Overton and Halliday, considered the biggest of any sister acts of the time. Overton and Halliday performed as the pair of Honolulu Belles in the Williams and Walker production of The Policy Players (1899), and from there, Overton decided to develop as a soloist with more substantial roles. In The Sons of Sam (1900), she sang and danced "Miss Hannah from Savannah" and "Leading Lady." James Weldon Johnson recalled in his autobiography that Ada Overton "had a low-pitched voice with a natural sob to it, which she knew how to use with telling effect in putting over a song." Tom Fletcher remembered that she was a dancer "who could do almost anything, and no matter whether it was a buck-and-wing, cakewalk, or even some form of grotesque dancing, she lent the performance a neat gracefulness of movement which was unsurpassed by anyone."
In 1899 Overton married George Walker and they became the leading cakewalking couple of the new century; in the cakewalk, they had found a quintessential black modernist expression—a high art worthy of being performed before royalty, for the white elite, and on the concert stage. In 1903, Williams and Walker production of In Dahomey was one of the first to realize the cakewalk's transformation. Ad soon changed the spelling of her name, from Ada to Aida, the name of the Haitian loa (spirit) of fertility, rainbows, and snakes and the wife of the snake god Danbala. In that production, Ada and George's cakewalk was one that has never been matched. As the writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten noted of their performance, "The line, the grace, the assured ecstasy of these dancers, who bent over backward until their heads almost touched the floor, a feat demanding an incredible amount of strength, their enthusiastic prancing, almost in slow motion, have never been equaled in this particular revel, let alone surpassed." In 1903, Dahomey was presented as a command performance before Edward VII at Buckingham Palace, in the private quarters of the royal family. British high society followed the royal family for a gushing enthusiasm for cakewalking. When Overton Walker returned to New York, she used her reformed cakewalk choreography as entrée to elite white society. She promoted cakewalk's grace and eloquence by terming it "the modern cakewalk." She provided the dance with a new gloss, converting it from its past in a lower-class black "dance halls" that referenced the old slave culture to being an icon of the modern concert hall.
Overton Walker used the performing arts as a vehicle for upward mobility in the "racial uplift" movement of middle-class blacks. Influenced in part by W. E. B. Dubois's idea that the "talented tenth" among African Americans rose and pulled all that were worth saving up to their vantage point, many turn-of-the-century African American women became social activists and—in their commitment to improving the social, cultural, moral, and material conditions of women—feminists. That commitment was formly resounded when Overton Walker argued that her performances were a reaction against the long standing image of actresses as morally unfit.
In 1908 Overton Walker was featured in Williams and Walker's Bandanna Land, and her dancing continued to draw attention for its gracefulness. Soon after Bandanna Land opened, a new solo, "the Dancing of Salome," was added for her. One evening in 1908 while onstage in Bandanna Land, George Walker, playing the role of Bud Jenkins, became ill. He was later diagnosed as having syphilis. He left the show in 1980 and his role was rewritten for Overton Walker, who donned his flashy male clothes and sang his numbers. While renewing her contract with Williams and Walker, she joined the cast of Bob Cole and J. Rosamand Johnson's Red Moon, in which she was featured in two numbers, "Pheobe Brown" and "Pickaninny Days." She next opened at the American Theater in 1909 with a vaudeville act featuring herself and eight girls of color.
By July 1911, six months after her husband died, Overton Walker had formed a new vaudeville act with one male and eight female dancers, in which she sang "Shine" as a male, impersonating her late husband, and she performed the new dance craze "The Barbary Coast" in close embrace with her new male partner. From 1912 until her heath in 1914, Overton Walker continued to choreograph for two black female dance group[s, the Happy Girls and Porto Rico Girls, who dancers included Lottie Gee, who would later star in the musical revue Shuffle Along (1921); and Elida Webb, who would star at the Cotton Club in the 1920s.
In 1912, Overton Walker danced "Salome" in a spectacular vaudeville performance at Oscar Hammerstein's Victoria Theater in New York. She also rejoined Bert Williams for the annual Frog's Frolic, appearing onstage with Bill Robinson. In 1913, Overton Walker's dream to produce her own show was realized with a company of twelve at ther Pekin Theatre in Chicago. In 1914, she switched from African-style dance to ballroom dance in her vaudeville act, with her new partner Lackaye Grant. The tango picnic, in July of that year, she and partner Grant performed their ballroom dance act to much acclaim. The tango picnic was Overton Walker's last public appearance. She died in October of 1914 of kidney disease.
Mourned as the foremost African American female stage artist, Overton Walker's interest in both African American indigenous material and her translation of these to the modern stage anticipated the choreographic work of modern dance pioneers Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus. Both in her solo work for women and in the unison and precision choreographies for the female chorus, she claimed a female presence on the American theatrical stage. By negociating the narrow white definitions of appropriate black performance with her own version of black specialization and innovation, Overton Walker established a black cultural identity onstage that established a model by which African American musical artists could gain acceptance on the professional concert stage.
[Source: Constance Valis Hill, Tap Dancing America, A Cultural History (2010)]