“This is how I approach Blackness: It’s celebratory…It’s something that I don’t want to move away from, I want to move closer to.” E. Ethelbert Miller, Washington, DC-based poet activist The internationally renowned and celebrated Step Afrika!, specializes in stepping: “a percussive, highly-energetic art form..[in which] the body becomes an instrument, using footsteps, claps and […]
Review: A rousing silver anniversary for Step Afrika!
A quarter-century ago, C. Brian Williams, who’d honed his step-dancing skills as a member of Alpha Phi Alpha at Howard University, was visiting South Africa at the dawn of the Nelson Mandela presidency. Williams saw a boy on a roadside doing a step-like gumboot dance, the kind miners in that country developed to communicate with […]
Dance Review: Step Afrika!’s Soul-Stirring ‘Migration’
The painter Jacob Lawrence’s 60-panel Migration Series chronicles the exodus of more than six million African-Americans from the South to the North starting around 1916. The WPA-funded project was published in 1941 when he was 25. Step Afrika!, D.C.’s home-grown step dance company, takes spirited inspiration from these works in The Migration: Reflections on Jacob […]
From painting to stepping, Step Afrika! closes its season with its acclaimed The Migration
In 1941, Jacob Lawrence became one of the first black artists to have his work shown in a New York City art gallery, with his powerful Migration Series on display, a sequence of 60 paintings depicting the mass movement of over 5 million African Americans from the rural South to the urban North between World […]
Step Afrika
SLAM tap tap tap tap… SLAM tap tap tap tap…. Like a shot from a gun or a huge book crashing to the ground, the SLAM defies description. It’s a sound not so much heard as felt. The impact of the man’s shoe on the stage sends vibrations into my chest.
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