Talk:Lavinia Williams

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A fact from Lavinia Williams appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 27 September 2006. The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that the African-American dancer Lavinia Williams gave up ballet stardom in the United States to spend decades developing national schools of Caribbean traditional dance in Haiti, Guyana, and the Bahamas?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2006/September.

Wikipedia

Quick note on this page, having just created it[edit]

I am astonished that Lavinia Williams did not already have an article. I first heard her name in Leon Theremin and was fascinated by their star-crossed love story. But when I searched for her on the internet, I found she had lived a remarkable life with a long and influential international career... and the pages that discuss her make no mention of Theremin! Then when I searched for Theremin, I found a number of sites that referred to his African-American dancer wife as "Iavana Williams", though also several called her "Lavinia" and they were not just clones of the Wikipedia article. So, in short, I would like a source more authoritative than the internet before simply stating this tidbit to be true—hence the "citation needed" tag.

For more on this, please see my post to Talk:Léon Theremin.

EsdnePyaJ 15:01, 24 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Update: I found this source[1], the site seems credible but no credits or sources are given for this particular article. Maybe we can e-mail them and find out the 411. EsdnePyaJ 13:02, 27 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

References in need of legwork[edit]

I listed two references within the article.[edit]

[2] by Zita Allen. A very nice little biography as part of a web companion to a Great Performances series. I believe that this is actually a transcription of "Source Citation: 'Lavinia Williams.' ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN CULTURE AND HISTORY. 5 vols. Macmillan, 1996. Reprinted by permission of Gale Group." mentioned at the bottom of the page. If someone could confirm this, we can put that into the references list in the article, perhaps with a link back to this piece online, which does appear to be legally webposted.
[3]. A funeral service notice. The Allen piece listed above gives the reference for her actual obituary: "Dunning, Jennifer. 'Lavinia Williams, 73, A Dancer.' NEW YORK TIMES, August 10, 1989."—this would be a helpful source to look up.

And one that mentions her daughter Sara Yarborough.[edit]

Not very helpful, but fact-checks the claim that S. Y. is a professional dancer.

Kisselgoff, Anna. The New York Times. "Dance: For Alvin Ailey, 25th Anniversary Gala. December 2, 1983. [4]

Here are some other sources that I found references for:[edit]

"Lavinia Williams: History in Motion." IN-STEP (April 1980): 3, 16. Listed in the Allen piece.
[5], the Internet Broadway Database. Would be nice to work some of this into the article. Oddly, she is not listed as being in Finian's Rainbow ([6]), in which she was performing when she married Shannon Yarborough according to the Allen biography.
[7] and [8], relating to the the Guyana Folk Festival of New York. I was not sure from these whether the Guyana Cultural Organization of New York named an award after her or actually gave her the award (very) posthumously. So I just left it out, but it is interesting if we can figure out just what it is.
[9]: she has an entry at All Movie Guide (her ID # there is P198875). There is no information here that is not already in the Allen piece, except the assertion that she was in "a few" movies, a claim I could not back up using IMDB.
[10]: the tantalizing promise on Bob Corbett's Haiti list of a transcript of a two-hour interview with Williams. It does not appear to have been posted on Corbett's site or elsewhere, though.
[11]. A very nice book excerpt, I just don't have time to incorporate information from it into the article right now, if you do please add it to the references list!

Additionally, I found references to works by or featuring Williams.[edit]

The first is listed in the Allen piece, the rest are in an archived listserv post ([12]) that I found when I did a quick internet search for Williams. I could only find one of them when I ran my own quick library catalog search, so I'm just putting the others here, please add them into the article if you can confirm they exist and fill out the citations.

Yarborough, Lavinia Williams."Haiti Where I Dance and Teach." DANCE MAGAZINE (October 1956): 4244, 7679.
Yarborough, Lavinia Williams. "Dances of the Bahamas & Haiti." New York: City College of New York, 1980.
Lavinia Williams oral history collection, with Haitian dance demonstrations. Audiovisual. 1983.
Yarborough, Lavinia Williams. "Haiti-dance." Frankfurt am Main, 1959.
Yarborough, Lavinia Williams. "Ballets d'Haiti" bamboche creole, 20th anniversary. Panorama, 1972.
featured in "Eye On Dance: Third world dance tracing roots." Audiovisual. ARC Video Dance, 1981.

I need to stop now, but there's definitely a lot of room for expanding the piece.

EsdnePyaJ 06:32, 24 September 2006 (UTC), updated 18:32, 24 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Theremin's return to the USSR[edit]

There is no evidence that Leon Theremin was "abducted" and taken back to the USSR. The claims that he was taken against his will stem from the film Theremin, an Electronic Odyssey, and are third hand hearsay. Glinsky's bio of Theremin is researched, sourced, and shows that Theremin went back to the USSR of his own free will (probably to escape tax troubles in the USA).THD3 (talk) 17:51, 17 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]