page_title: Gertrude Hoffmann (dancer)
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Gertrude Hoffmann (dancer) / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: Two sketches of Gertrude Hoffman, drawn by Marguerite Martyn, and published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 7, 1909
context_page_description: Katherine Gertrude Hoffmann was an American early 20th-century vaudeville dancer and choreographer.
context_section_description: In 1903 Gertrude Hoffmann was hired as a rehearsal director at Oscar Hammerstein’s Victoria Theater working with the sixty member "Punch and Judy Co." shows and other vaudeville routines performing at the venue. Willie Hammerstein persuaded her to appear on the stage. Three years later she replaced an ill performer in Ziegfeld’s "The Parisian Dancer" and became a hit imitating Anna Held singing "I Just Can’t Make My Eyes Behave". Over her career, Gertrude also did impersonations of various other performers, such as Eva Tanguay, Eddie Foy, and Ethel Barrymore.
  Her choreography and special dance effects brought her high praise and rebuke. Her role as Salome in "Vision of Salome" which she introduced around 1908 caused scandal at many theater houses around the country. On several occasions her suggestive dance style in scant costumes would lead to her arrest by local police. Eva Tanguay, Vera Olcott, and Lotta Faust would also find success with the Salome dance.
  Later in her career she became manager and choreographer of the Gertrude Hoffmann Girls. Reminiscent of the Tiller Girls, her dancers used a type of athletic acrobatic transformation of the chorus girl with kicks, leaps, etc. The Gertrude Hoffmann Girls performed in the Shubert review Artists and Models that ran for the entire 1925-26 season at the Winter Garden and also had long runs over the following two seasons with A Night in Paris and A Night in Spain. In 1933 she resurrected the Hoffmann dancers and had some success touring America and Europe prior the outbreak of the Second World War. Not much is known of her later life other than she may have at one time operated a dance studio or club in Southern California.
  In 2006 the social historian Armond Fields listed Gertrude Hoffmann in his book Women Vaudeville Stars: Eighty Biographical Profiles. The Gertrude Hoffmann Glide, a two step or turkey-trot dance named after her in 1913, was recorded by the Victor Military Band and sold through Sears Catalogs.
caption: Hoffman as drawn by Marguerite Martyn for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 1909
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