Celebrating its 30th season, the Washington-D.C.-based step dance troupe Step Afrika! brings an expanded version of its 2011 piece “The Migration: Reflections on Jacob Lawrence” to the University of California, Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall on Nov. 2-3.
The Cal Performances event offers a particularly appropriate stage for stepping, a theatrical, communal, percussive dance form that flourishes in Black fraternal groups on college campuses, according to Step Afrika! Artistic Director Mfoniso Akpan.
“When you come to see Step Afrika! perform you are really getting a full sensory experience,” Akpan says. “It’s not just about what you are seeing, but it’s also about what you’re hearing, and it’s very much a community event. We’re not just up here performing, but we turn that theater and stage into a live drum. So that feeling you get when you hear the rhythm really moves the audience but also the dancers, and it’s a form of expression.”
Akpan says step dance is not a form “where you can go to an institute and study it formally, like ballet or jazz. It’s a cultural art form that started with the fraternities and sororities, and that’s how most people learned to step back in the day. And a lot of the students were in school for diverse reasons and majors — math, science, journalism or computer science.”
Step Afrika!’s 17 members are college graduates with dance backgrounds, as is Akpan. Originally from Queens, New York, Akpan studied various dance forms as a youngster at the Bernice Johnson Cultural Arts Center. She stepped as a cheerleader in high school and stepped as a member of Delta Sigma Theta sorority at State University of New York at Stony Brook. After auditioning for Step Afrika! in 2005, she joined the company; She has appeared at Carnegie Hall, Avery Fisher Hall, the Apollo Theater and the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
“The Migration: Reflections on Jacob Lawrence” was created by Step Afrika founder C. Brian Williams, who was inspired by paintings by Black artist Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000), best known for depicting the daily lives of African Americans. Paintings in 1940-41, his “Migration Series,” tell the story of how millions of Black Americans began moving from the South to Northeastern, Midwestern and Western states in 1910.
Projected examples of Lawrence’s works—for the first time including images from New York’s Museum of Modern Art collection as well some from the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.—dominate the set design for Step Afrika!’s “The Migration.”
While the identities of the people in Lawrence’s paintings are not distinct, recognizable Step Afrika! dancers in motion enliven the story in ways the artwork can’t.
“The harmony we create between the visual art and the performing art is astonishing and beautiful because we really do bring those paintings to life,” Akpan says. “Everyone has a migration story—this is America—so the universality of that experience is something audiences can connect with, especially when seeing the paintings and then seeing the work that we do onstage.”
Set to a soundtrack with music by John Coltrane, Nina Simone, gospel and West African drumming, this version of “The Migration” features new choreography to best suit the current ensemble. It also includes intentional changes in costuming.
“The original costume design is by Kenann Quander, and she did a lot of research in terms of the look that we needed to recreate,” Akpan says. “Then some of the costumes were revamped and reimagined, so that the colors you see in the costuming are mimicked by what you see in Lawrence’s paintings. We paid attention to the color and tone that we chose so there would be some harmony between the two.”
In addition to the two shows, Step Afrika!’s Cal Performances’ visit includes master classes, community workshops and sponsorship of tickets for local students.
Ultimately, the movement in “The Migration” onstage in Zellerbach Hall is as relevant today as it was when it first happened, and when it later captured Lawrence’s imagination—but with a twist.
“The story is timeless, but it is also cyclical,” Akpan says. “When you look at what the country is going through now, there is a reverse migration of African Americans moving from the North back to their roots in the South.”
Cal Performances presents Step Afrika! in “The Migration: Reflections on Jacob Lawrence” at 8 p.m. Nov. 2 and 3 p.m. Nov. 3 in Zellerbach Hall, near Bancroft Way and Dana Street, on the University of California, Berkeley campus. Tickets are $37-$118 (with student discounts available) at (510) 642-9988 or calperformances.org.
The post Step Afrika! dancers tell ‘Migration’ story set to iconic Jacob Lawrence artworks appeared first on Local News Matters.