Virginia Edmunda Hammer
[2][3] An early exposure to a stage career came through her elder brother, Paul Hammer junior (1869–1947), who worked at the Salt Lake City Theater from around the time she was born until its closure in 1928.
[4] Both Edmunda and her first future husband, Oscar Eliason, would end up performing at the theatre, at a time when they were under Paul Hammer's management.
In one early joint performance in January 1893 she was “Electra, the Magnetic Wonder – a Young Lady who Challenges the United Strength of Six Powerful Men”.
With Eliason, she became the “Marvellous Bicyclist”, performing what one reviewer described as “one of the most inexplicable” tricks imaginable, appearing to ride a bicycle in mid-air, including downwards, with no visible means of support.
[14] Wrote another: “An invaluable aid to Dante in his show is Mdlle Edmunda, whose graceful movements in diaphanous robes with limelight effects is a very pleasing feature of the evening’s entertainment.
[15] After record-setting seasons in both Sydney and Melbourne, and a trip to Australia’s west coast, Eliason had just finished three shows in Dubbo, New South Wales, when he died after being accidentally shot while kangaroo hunting in November 1899.
“The various…tricks and illusions – the most sensational of which was the consumption by fire and disappearance of Madame Edmunda – were done with all the celerity and cleverness of a past master in the art of magic and mystery,” wrote one reviewer.
[21] In January 1900, Edmunda left Sydney for a tour of New Zealand with Frank Eliason, in line with a wish expressed by her husband on his death-bed for her to continue his show.
[26] Less than three months after the birth of Oscar junior, Edmunda hired a nurse to accompany her and left Sydney for a tour of New South Wales and Queensland as Madame Dante the Great, explaining that was completing her late husband's bookings.
[31] Despite her dance act being well received in Sydney, and then in Melbourne[32] and Adelaide, Edmunda told an interviewer she was thinking of touring India and South Africa as a magician.
[33] Instead she joined Dix’s Gaiety Company in January 1902 for a tour of New Zealand, in which she was promoted both as “America’s greatest illusionary dancer”[34] and as the widow of the late Dante the Great.
She was intending to leave Ethel and Oscar with relatives in Salt Lake City for a few months to resume “vaudeville, dancing and magic” when the new theatre season opened that September.
[40] There is strong evidence that Edmunda later worked back in the US with another leading American illusionist from Utah, Robert (Bob) "Doc" Cunningham (1873–1951), who visited Oscar Eliason's grave and met her in Sydney in 1902.
[44] Cunning promised that Mademoiselle Edmunda would also demonstrate “mind reading” by correctly naming numbers written on a blackboard by audience members while blindfolded, then doing calculations with them.
[46] Later that year, a report previewing other shows in Utah hinted at her performances in Australia when it stated that Mademoiselle Edmunda's “psychological experiments” were “the wonder of two continents”.
