Invited to join the fun, we stomp, clap and shout ‘alright,’ in a call and response ritual that harks across oceans and time. Faces aglow, united, and energized, the audience for Step Afrika!’s Sunday matinee at Zellerbach Hall on the UC Berkeley campus are willing participants, eager to shed the anxiety we carry in varying degrees in these baffling days leading up to the 2024 presidential election. Skilled ambassadors, the dancers and musicians of step dance company Step Afrika! bring this performance of The Migration: Reflections on Jacob Lawrence to a suitably rapturous participatory closing.
Crafted in celebration of this step dance company’s 30th anniversary, The Migration: Reflections on Jacob Lawrence uses Black dance forms and music to bring to life Lawrence’s evocative and colorful images while expanding the timeline to begin in an African village, as if to say, in the beginning there is drumming, the percussive heartbeat of Africa.
The hour and forty-minute show, including an intermission, is comprised of ten dances by a variety of choreographic voices and styles. With the Step Afrika! as our guides, we see how African dance traditions evolve in America: beginning with hand drumming and barefoot dancing, adapting to the pounding of a stick when the masters forbid drums, and expanding to the hard soled shoes and drum kits of 20’s era jazz halls. Tap dance and then finally step dance, the intricate percussive dance form for which Step Afrika! is internationally renowned, takes center stage.
Step Afrika! company performing The Migration: Reflections on Jacob Lawrence; Photo: Jati Lindsay
In 1940-41 African American artist Jacob Lawrence painted “The Migration of the Negro,” a series of 60 panels which dramatically depict the post–World War I migration of African-Americans from the rural South to the industrial North. For this danced tribute, a montage of Lawrence’s bold paintings appear on a quilt of screens that back the stage. Images ranging from crowded train stations, towering apartment buildings, and well-dressed City folks to those of a bereft mourner under a hangman’s lynch, flooded fields, and civil unrest, set the stage. Step Afrika!’s dancers embody both the joyful and the heartrending scenes.
The magic of this production is in how the music, dance, and visual landscape support each other artistically. Just as Lawrence’s images set the stage, the evolution of garments from plantation to city, from agricultural to industrial, transport us on our journey north. Live musicians and vocalists add authenticity and richness. The spiritual “Wade in the Water” is offered first by a soloist and then by a quartet in a series of varied arrangements that demonstrate an evolution in emotional tone from haunting need for caution to the exalted feeling of freedom. As Lawrence’s pictures vary from crowd scenes to individual figures, so too do the dances. Throughout, the dancers’ camaraderie flows easily in their synchronized group sections; the solo and smaller ensemble works are deeply emotive, while highlighting the individual talents and personalities of the nineteen cast members.
Step Afrika! company performing The Migration: Reflections on Jacob Lawrence; Photo: Jati Lindsay
The first dance, Drum Call, sets the stage for interdisciplinary triumph. Performers in tribal-inspired costumes, their sticks ablur, create complicated rhythms upon a field of waist-high drums. A flash of lightning signals the arrival of foreigners. Forming a ring, facing into the center they dance around a single drummer, knees bent, arms stabbing outward they click sticks with their neighbors. Searchlights cut through the theatrical haze. The dancers scatter, leaving a sole drummer, his instrument tethered to his body hangs between his legs. Speedy complicated rhythms emerge, not from sticks, but from his supple hands. Silhouetted behind him, dancers raise their arms, twisting so their wrists marry as if tied. Their vertical reach directs us to the screens above, upon which Lawrence’s painted images of prisoners’ shackled wrists are projected (Panel 22). We have arrived in America.
Lawrence’s painting series is crafted in two parts, the first illustrating the hardships and injustices which Blacks experienced in the South, the second portraying the life of the migrants upon reaching the North. The two acts of this Step Afrika! show follow a similar trajectory arcing from Africa to America, with the second focused on post-WWI and the Great Migration period. The sinuous full-bodied dances of West Africa, the pantomime of the plantations’ Ring Shout, the high kicks and tight one-legged spins of jazz carry us along.
The Step Afrika! company’s enthusiasm and artistry dazzle with each new scene. A riverside baptism awakens the spirit of tap in the newly immersed dancer. Dangling at the end of their arms, the prop suitcases of a trio of traveling men become a visual representation of the train cars upon which they ride, as they follow each other in line across the stage. A trio of women is left behind. One wears fieldhand cottons, another calico prairie ruffles, and a third, white-collared urban wear. The yearning of their dances tells similar stories of longing for their men gone to pave the way to a better life.
Step Afrika! company performing The Migration: Reflections on Jacob Lawrence; Photo: Jati Lindsay
Individuality blossoms in the North. The dancers move with authentic freshness. A sailor, a deacon, a mother, an office girl, and a dandy couple in top hat and enveloping full-length fur coat that match a Lawrence image, join forces for the invigorating stepping, boot slapping, chest thumping and clapping of the finale number, Chicago, choreographed by director and projection designer Jakari Sherman.
The Migration demonstrates how dance and music honors ancestry, provides connections across cultures, expresses truths and embodies hope for ever greater freedom and individuation while honoring the importance of the collective. With their infectious smiles and syncopated rhythms, the Step Afrika! company stirred the hope in us. Maybe, just maybe we will elect a Black-Asian woman to be our next president.
Review by Jen Norris, published November 5 (Election Day) 2024
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