Ned Wayburn

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Ned Wayburn, born Edward Claudius Weyburn, (March 30, 1874- September 2, 1942) was easily the most famous and influential choreographer in the early twentieth century. He was born in Atlanta, Georgia but spent much of his childhood in Chicago where he was introduced to theater and studied classical piano. At the age of 21, he abandoned his family’s tradition of manufacturing and began teaching at the Hart Conway School of Acting in Chicago. There he worked with three faculty members that directly influenced his growing interest in dance and movement: C.H. Jacobsen, Colonel Thomas Hoyer Monstery, and Ida Simpson-Serven whose teachings were based on Delsarte’s concepts about the meaning of gestures and their ability to communicate the emotion.

After leaving the school, Wayburn spent many years in theater staging shows for producers. He worked with such teams as Oscar and William Hammerstein, and Marc Klaw and A.L. Erlanger. In 1906, he began his own management group called the Headline Vaudeville Production Company. Through his own firm he staged many feature acts, while collaborating with other producers such as Lew Fields, William Ziegfeld and the Shuberts. In 1915, he began working with Florenz Ziegfeld and created the incredibly successful Ziegfeld Follies.

Wayburn’s choreography was based on six idioms or techniques: musical comedy, tapping and stepping, acrobatic work, modern American ballet, toe specialties, and exhibition ballroom. He was also known to be influenced by social traditions of the time period. As a child, he was captivated by Minstrel shows and recreated them in many of his works. Formation symmetry was common in minstrel shows, as well as parade. Wayburn used Minstrel style costumes and makeup in his show Minstrel Misses(1903).

His choreography was greatly affected by social dances of the time. His dancers moved in units of two or four, following popular trends. He also used a group of dancers to form shapes, as inspired by the Cotillion. During this a group would form the letters V, C, and W as well as coils and bisected circles. He also was famous for taking dances such as tangos, the Turkey Trot, the Grizzly Bear, the Black Bottom and the Charleston and re-creating them for stage performances by using strong exaggerations of movement.

Some of his well known shows were Phantastic Phantoms (1907), The Daisy Dancers (1906), The Passing Show (1913), and of course all of the Ziegfeld Follies. He created steps such as the “Ziegfeld Walk” and the “Gilda Glide”, and worked with many well-known performers of the time such as Fred Astaire, Gilda Gray, Marilyn Miller, Ann Pennington, Barbara Stanwyck, Clifton Webb, Mae West, Evelyn Law and Fanny Brice.

[edit] References

Stratyner, Barbara (1996). Ned Wayburn and the Dance Routine: From Vaudville to the Ziegfeld Follies. Society of Dance History Scholars. ISBN 0-9653519-2-0.