Legomania style Buck
Dance routine. The show went broke in Montana and Ida hand to
sing in the streets for money for a ticket home.
In 1898 she was working with
the Black Patti Troubadours traveling
the circuit from New York to the Barbary Coast until 1902. She
won many Cakewalk contests along the way. After the Troubadours
she worked for many minstrel houses in New York and Coney Island
where she learned to become a Blues Shouter. In 1902 she joined
the Smart Set production and sang and did some Jazz dancing. By
1904 Ida's career was booming. Her warm personality and her facial
expressions always won over the crowd. While returning from a
successful tour in London she received man offers she accepted
one from the Marinelli Agency that would last for the next nine
years. During this time would be her biggest successes. It was
her she would receive her greatest training and attention. Playing
such places as the Moulin Rouge, Alhambra Theatre and even gave
a command performance for the Royal Family.
Ida was basically as self
trained Vernacular dancer who would portray a colored "Topsy"
girl character who would sing and dance. She wore a bandana, created
dances such as her Sack Dance
and even got the chorus lines to Blacken' Up (Blackface) during
her performances. She became a real success. However her biggest
success would be when she created her Russian
Dance routines complete with Russian costumes made in St.
Petersburg, Russia, Boots and had her own music scored for her
as well. She did these Russian dances abroad for many years and
later the states.
In America, the Russian dance
was usually performed with what they called 'Kazotsky's', where
the dancer squats down, crosses their arms across their chest
and kicks their legs out alternately. Altho this was an already
established Hungarian dance called Czardas and not Russian, most
Americans would not know the difference and still today see it
as Russian dancing. Ida Forsyne was one of the first American
woman to do these 'Kazotsky's' at the end of her performance in
her Moscow program. These "Kazotsky's where done long before
her but after this one performance, and her improvisations of
it, she would be hailed (incorrectly) as the greatest Russian
dancer of all time as she traveled the world for nine years without
a break. For about 15 years this style Ida started would be done
by many dancers in Vaudeville and even on the Broadway Stages
from 1911 to 1925 (Russian dancing was popular before Ida
in the States and was a popular style to be done in Vaudeville
as early as 1900, but Ida brought it to the forefront.)
Russian / Hungarian dancing
was popular in the States especially in American Vaudeville as
early as 1900, but Ida Forsyne brought it to the forefront, up
until Tap
dancers started to control the Stages. Ida
Forsyne, Greenlee
and Drayton, U.S.
Thompson, Willie Covan, Dewey Weinglass and others would excel
in these quote"Russian Dances," often times calling
it Legomania
and sometimes a mixture of these and other dances were called
Eccentric
dancing after WWI.
When Ida returned home from London she found it very hard to get
a job as the timing was not right for many of the "Dark Skinned
African American" performers even in the South. She found
few jobs that would pay her any real money, worked as a maid for
awhile, even worked with Bessie Smith as a backup dancer, then
back as a maid and again back to a $35 a week gig in a chorus
and finally as a hotel elevator operator. Her Russian dances were
now just old hat as Tap, Shake dances, Shimmies and more were
filling the Stages and a Dark Skinned Black women doing Russian
dances was not very popular with the audiences who would actually
Boo her on Stage. She couldn't go back to London due to the war
and says "it was really hard to go from star status to nothing
in a blink of an eye." She finally gave up the Russian acts
and just kept trying to get work and worked off and on into her
sixties and spent the remainder of her life in a nursing home.
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