Aida Overton Walker (1880-1914), one of the most widely acclaimed African American performers of the early twentieth century, was known largely for popularizing a dance form known as the cakewalk through her choreographing, performance, and teaching of the dance. The cakewalk was originally developed prior to the United States Civil War by retained features characteristic of African dance forms, such as gliding steps and an emphasis on improvisation.
To this African-derived foundation, the cakewalk added certain elements from European dances: where African dances feature flexible body postures, large groups and separate-sex dancing, the cakewalk developed into a high-kicking walk performed by a procession of couples. Ironically, while these modifications later enabled the cakewalk to appeal to European Americans and become European American stage performers, and these parodies in turn helped shape subsequent versions of the cakewalk.
While this complex evolution meant that the cakewalk was not a simple cultural phenomenon—one scholar has characterized this layering of parody upon parody with the phrase "mimetic vertigo"—it is in fact what enabled the dance to attract its wide audience. In the cultural and socioeconomic flux of the turn-of-the-century United States, where many things to many people in order to appeal to a large audience.
Walker's remarkable success at popularizing the cakewalk across otherwise relatively rigid racial boundaries rested on her ability to address within her interpretation of it the varying and sometimes conflicting demands placed on the dance. Middle-class African Americans, for example, often denounced the cakewalk as disreputable, a complaint reinforced by the parodies circulating flourishes of her version of the cakewalk a fitting vehicle for celebrating their newfound social rank.
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