Aida Overton Walker

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Passage

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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Answers that restate a true detail from the passage but don't answer the specific question being asked.

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The question

19.

The passage provides sufficient information to answer which one of the

Answer choices

Correct77% picked this
What were some of the attributes of African dance forms that were preserved
Why this is right
The final sentence of the first paragraph says, the cakewalk retained features characteristic of African dance forms, such as gliding steps and an emphasis on improvisation. So "gliding steps" and "emphasis on improv" are two attributes that were preserved.
Skill tested: Five Questions · how this choice captures the passage's function is the move to repeat next time.
77%
Too Strong: first2% picked this
Who was the first performer to dance the
Aida was the person most responsible for popularizing the cakewalk, but the passage never says that she was the very first performer to dance it professionally. It also would be WAY too easy a question if the correct answer were just the main character of the passage.
2%
Out of Scope3% picked this
What is an aspect of the cakewalk that was preserved in other North
Out of Scope: other N.A. dance forms "North America" is only mentioned in the 2nd paragraph, and the only thing said about it is: the cakewalk became one of the first cultural forms to cross the racial divide in North America. So we never hear about any North American dance forms or hear how cakewalk influenced them.
3%
Out of Scope: added to parodies18% picked this
What features were added to the original cakewalk by the stage parodies circulating at the end
The only information we get about parodies is the final sentence of the 2nd paragraph: by the end of the 19th, the cakewalk was itself being parodied by European American stage performers, and these parodies in turn helped shape subsequent versions of the cakewalk. So the passage doesn't enlighten us about any features the parodies added. Some of us may have been confused because earlier in the 2nd paragraph they talked about the "grandiloquent, high-kicking walk" being a parody of the dances at slave owners' balls. But that was a feature of the original cakewalk, not a feature that got added in parodies of the cakewalk near the end of the 19th century.
18%
Out of Scope: longevity of popularity0% picked this
For about how many years into the twentieth century did the cakewalk
The passage gives us no information about how long the popularity of the cakewalk lasted.
0%

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