Ida Forsyne as 'Topsy'

Dancer Ida Forsyne as "Topsy," with Abbie Mitchell's Tennessee Students in London, England.

Ida Forsyne, jazz dancer who was named by poet Langston Hughes as one of the twelve best dancers of all time, was born in Chicago, Illinois. Her mother became a domestic servant when she was two years old, after the disappearance of her father. At the age of ten, she was dancing and singing for small sums of money at the local candy store and house-rent parties, and she cakewalked for twenty-five cents a day at the Chicago World's Fair, traveling through the festival site in a wagon with a ragtime band to drum up trade.

Many shows originated in Chicago at the time, and so Forsynes haunted the Alhambra Theater, watching rehearsals of such shows as Coontown 400 and The South before the War. At age fourteen Forsyne ran away with a tab show, The Black Bostonians, in which everyone did their own specialties. She sang "My Hannah Lady" and also performed a Buck Dance in her inimitable eccentric style that includes rhythmic stepping and legomania. The finale of the show was a plantation scene that included the entire cast. When the show broke up in Bute, Montana, Forsyne adopted a five-year-old boy as a "prop" and sang her way back home to Chicago by walking down the aisles of the railroad coaches, hand-in-hand with him, harmonizing "On the Banks of the Wabash" as she passed the child's hat and collected enough money to pay fare and little more.

In 1898 the fifteen-year-old joined Sisseretta Jones' Black Patti Troubadours. "A girl in the show was sick, so I went down and did my number, ‘My Hannah Lady,' and got the job at $15 a week," Forsyne told Marshall Stearns. "I was the only young girl in the company of twenty-six. For my specialty, I pushed a baby carriage across the stage and sang a lullaby, ‘You're Just a Little Nigger but You're Mine All Mine,' and no one thought of objecting in those day." The show had a cakewalking contest at every performance and Forsyne and partner won it seven nights straight in a row by adding legomania and tumbling in the breaks.

Forsyne had the ability to perform any step she saw. In 1899, on her sixteenth birthday, Forsyne and the Black Patti troupe arrived in San Francisco, and remembers that they stayed at a fine white hotel and ate together at a long table, and that "everyone was so nice to us." Returning to New York, she easily got jobs working in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and Coney Island, working in minstrel-styled shows such as Henderson's Big Theater (at Coney Island) with famous acts like Eddie Cantor. It was at Coney Island that Forsyne lost her voice in an "all song-and-dance" format in which performers would sing a verse of the song, then a chorus, and then dance a chorus. "I was like a coon shouter until my voice gave out," she said about her voice which was in a strong alto-range. She thereafter learned how to put a song across by "sort of talking it."

In 1902, Forsyne joined the original Smart Set, an all- colored show by the white producer Gus Hill and featuring Ernest Hogan, Billy McClain, and the Hun Brothers, and in which she talked the song, "Moana" and performed a solo jazz dance. She then joined Will Marion Cook's The Southerners on the New York Roof Garden, with a mixed cast of thirty-five performers. In 1905 she went abroad with The Tennessee Students, a troupe of seventeen performers (including Abbie Mitchell, comedy dancer Ernest Hogan, and sand dancer Henry Williams), many of whom played stringed instruments and sang in a transitional style between ragtime and jazz. When the show opened at the Palace Theater in London in 1906, Forsyne (her picture on the front cover of the program) was the billing star, singing "Topsy, the Famous Negro Dancer." With her radiating personality and facial expression, she was immediately noticed. Wrote the Daily Telegraph: "If Topsy is not soon the talk of the town we are very much mistaken." For the succeeding nine years. Forsyne toured Europe under the management of the Marinelli Agency, the largest in Europe, in what would be the peak of her career. The entire first year she played the Moulin Rouge in Paris, singing and dancing her fast mixture of eccentric steps. She was then booked throughout England where for the first time she saw Bill Robinson and Ralph Cooper. At the Alhambra Theatre in London, she introduced her Sack dance to special music with a ballet company. A stagehand carried her onstage in a big potato sack; she threw one leg out, then an arm, and so on until, dumped in the middle of the stage, she danced before a backup chorus line of ballet dancers who were paid extra to appear in blackface. While the performance was considered "arty," Forsyne was improvising jazz steps. She quickly rose to such fame that she gave a command performance for the Royal family.

In 1911, in the middle of her Moscow dance program, tiny Forsyne (she wore a size two shoe) suddenly inserted a series of improvised kazotsky kicks into her routine and brought the house down; she was immediately hailed as the "greatest Russian dancer of then all." She thereafter closed her act with kazotsky kicks-- which began from a squat, arms folded at the chest, and legs kicking out, first one leg and then another. Though Russian dancers usually stood up between steps, Forsyne could not wait. She changed steps and traveled across the stage in a crouch, working out new combinations. She flung both legs out in front of her and touched her toes with her hands before coming down in time with the music. She also mixed down-steps with up-steps, and cross-ankle steps, and as a finale, would kazotsky all the way across the stage, and return backwards. European theaters booked Forsyne for nine years without a break. Forsyne popularized Russian dancing in the United States, after pioneering that style abroad. But she was, above and beyond, a jazz dancer. She remembered many early jazz tap steps, among them "Going to the World's Fair," which was strut in which one put both feet together and moved forward on the toes. Another step was "Scratchin' the Gravel," or the "Sooey," a short sliding motion alternately on each foot; Forsyne described it as a two-step with a dip.

In 1914, Forsyne returned to New York from touring abroad and performed at the Lincoln and Lafayette theaters. High class society people went to the Lafayette and the management didn't present of-color blues singers, comedians and Shake dancers from T.O.B.A., as did at the Lincoln." In 1916, Forsyne saw Darktown Follies and remembers that it was the talk of the town. "Eddie Retor was featured in his smooth military routine, and Toots Davis was doing his Over the Top and Through the Trenches, and they were new steps then," she told Marshall Stearns. For two years (from 1920 to 1922), Forsyne worked as a personal maid, onstage and off, to Sophie Tucker, earning $50 a week. Onstage, Tucker sang thirteen songs, accompanied by pianist Al Seeger, and wanted a dancer to help whip up applause at the end of the show—and Forsyne filled that position. The act broke up in Washington, D.C. where, on the Keith circuit, new rules disallowed black performers to appear onstage with a white performer unless they wore blackface. Furthermore, no performer of color working backstage was permitted to watch the show. Tucker refused to have Forsyne don blackface, and while Forsyne was banned from the show, she was permitted to watch the show from the wings.

By 1924, Forsyne was back on the T.O.B.A. black vaudeville circuit as one of six dancing girls with blues singer Mamie Smith's act. After touring the South with the late version of The Smart Set, Forsyne returned to New York where Harlem nightclubs were thriving. Refused after auditioning at the Cotton Club, Connie's Inn, and the Nest, because of the preference for light-skinned and scantily-clad chorus girls, Forsyne was promised a job at Small's Paradise, which never panned out. As did a job working at the New World Club in Atlantic City in 1927, which was recommended to her by Jack "Legs" Diamond. Forsyne was apparently rejected for not approving of the abbreviated costumes which were de rigeur for female jazz dancers. Back on T.O.B.A., Forsyne earned $35 a week working with Bessie Smith, a show that allowed her to reprise her Russian specialty. She left Smith's company in 1928, vowing she would never tour the South again. After working three-and-a-half years as a domestic, and then as an elevator girl, Forsyne quit dancing. In 1963, however, she played the part of Mrs. Noah in Green Pastures. That same year, she appeared with Rex Ingraham in The Emperor Jones. As late as 1951, Forsyne assisted Ruthanna Boris for the choreography for the New York City Ballet's "The Cakewalk," choreographed by George Balanchine.

In 1962, at the age of seventy-nine, Forsyne could still perform a cartwheel. She devoted most of her spare time to visiting various hospitals where she entertained and cheered up sick friends. By 1966 she herself retired to the Concord Baptist Nursing Home in Brooklyn, where she died in 1983, at the age of 100.

Sources: Marshall and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (1968); Cary D. Wintz and Paul Finkelman, Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, Vol I. (2004); Blacks in Blackface: A Sourcebook on Early Black Musical Shows (Vol 1, 2nd ed.) by Henry T Sampson