Cover art by Delita Martin

Black Performance I: Subject and Method collects research that shows how performance can act as an optic and object of study. The authors’ diverse subjects reveal resonances of the past in performance in music and movement, poetry, media, art, museums, memory, and thought. The research in Black Performance II: Knowing and Being further demonstrates the ways performances in various genres contemplate and structure ways of knowing and ways of being as systems entangled in embodiments and critical interactivity. In this, women scholars identify performers’ diverse strategies for making meaning and remaking inherited knowledge. These scholars discover performance structures of Black feminist love in the work of various artists.

The performances reflect on new ways of being as much as the scholars who analyze them. Each performance also forges new ways of being that address how we understand, and perhaps feel, blackness, gender, transnational womanhood, community, sexuality, and history. The communities invoked develop common language and sensibility through aesthetics, speech, and writing. Several articles foreground the ways in which people work through ideas together in an enactment of community recognition. This occurs through relationships to form, through conversation, choreography, and writing. Melissa Blanco Borelli reveals Black transnational artists structure as radical presence through musical performance practices. Jasmine Elizabeth Johnson reveals dancers’ choreographic collaborative work founded on sharing spoken memories and stories as a process of “tenderness.” Shana L. Redmond experiments with collaborative and contrapuntal writing practices between Hansberry and Baldwin as negotiating a terrain of sound. Redmond explores the quotidian elements of sound as form—sound from the neighborhood as much as from music.

At times, the performers shape ideas with their audiences as interlocutor. In Aleksandra Szaniawska’s essay, Janelle Monae narrates queer possibilities via performances that find greater resonance before live and constructed audiences. In Rashida Braggs’s piece, our author as performer, addresses the nature of audiences’ hearing of history. Braggs brings performative ontology to the page to play with text as a conduit between thought, knowledge-making, performance, blackness, the body, music, and history. She recounts a performance she created as an investigation of Sidney Bechet’s performance of Gershwin’s “Summertime,” itself a layered enactment of historical consciousness. Braggs’s endeavor reflects the investigative and pedagogical directions of research as embodied practice.

Artist Delita Martin’s cover to this issue, “If Spirits Danced” poses a possibility echoed by our authors. With a quotidian boldness, the direct gaze of a Black girl in blue calmly engages and challenges. She ventures a hypothesis of lively possibility in her provocative titular “if” alongside an embedded invitation to do so, to dance in spirit and gesture.

 

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For a limited time, read the introduction by guest editor Stephanie Batiste, and “Of Treads and Thunder: The Insurgent Listening of Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin” by Shana L. Redmond, for free.

Support The Black Scholar by subscribing to print and digital issues here.

Our 2020 volume, which is also our 50th anniversary volume, is slated to include…

• At the Limits of Desire: Black Radical Pleasure
• Black Girls and Girlhood I
• What Was Black Studies?
• And more…

The following is the projected content for our 2021 and 2022 volumes…

• Black Privacy (read the CFP)
• Caribbean Global Movements
• Black Girls and Girlhood II
• Post-Soul Afro-Latinidades (read the CFP)
• And more…

Cover art by Delita Martin

This first of a two-part Special Issue on Black Performance samples diverse subjects and methodologies, ranging from theater and dance to art installation, music, literature, film, digital images, and social interaction. Edited by Stephanie Leigh Batiste, this issue positions Black performance as a site for solidifying the prescience and critical sharpness of Black creativity in shaping knowledge and sensibilities. In the ways that the contributors featured study performance, we see the past brought to bear to redefine what we know about history and Black histories in particular. In each essay, the author’s mode of analysis asks us to imagine how our present moment is or might be remade by the performances studied and by their performers’ exhortations towards proliferating ways of understanding blackness.

Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Francesca Negro introduce a lost archival folder that details a radical play written in Portuguese. This essay substantiates a hemispheric history of choreographic narrative in the lives of iconic dancers — Brazilian Solano Trinidade and American Alvin Ailey.

Sasha Ann Panaram analyzes poetry and post-modern performance in M. NourbeSe Philip’s textual and performative re-memory of the middle passage’s Zong massacre. The absented bodies of enslaved, murdered Africans become memorialized in writing, breath, and embodied art installation.

Christina Knight evaluates Black performances’ visual resonances in Arthur Jafa’s jazz-inflected film strategies in Love is the Message The Message is Death. She considers viewership, visual representation, and Black social performance in historically and digitally viral images.

Isaiah Matthew Wooden riffs on the historical sampling of memory in the performance practices of artist Derrick Adams’ ostensibly fine arts repertoire. Looping the terms repertoire, representing, representation, repetition (and, perhaps, reputation) in the hip hop idea of “reppin’,” Wooden’s deejay format spins beats of memory through Adams remixing of history.

DJ Lynée Denise presents a listener’s archeology of the song “Rock Steady” to sound our way through a musical legacy of soul. Denise moves in unruly genealogies against the grief of our loss of Aretha Franklin, a sonic shaper of Black feeling.

Redeployments of Black performances resound visually and sonically in these performers’ and scholars’ recombination of memory, feeling, and time. Artist Delita Martin’s cover “New Beginnings” places a mask, perhaps of ritual or theatrical mediation, in the company of a non-linear exchange of intergenerational looking and encounter. Our scholars follow suit. Their approaches mix a critical engagement with the past with systems of knowing and feeling blackness in creative critical conversations with the artists.

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For a limited time, the introduction and DJ Lynée Denise’s “The Afterlife of Aretha Franklin’s “Rock Steady:” A Case Study in DJ Scholarship” are free to download and read. Keep an eye out for our upcoming final issue for 2019, Black Performance 2.

Support The Black Scholar by subscribing to print and digital issues here.

Our 2020 volume, which is also our 50th anniversary volume, is slated to include…

• At the Limits of Desire: Black Radical Pleasure
• Black Girls and Girlhood I
• What Was Black Studies?
• And more…

The following is the projected content for our 2021 volume…

• Black Privacy (read the CFP here)
• Caribbean Global Movements
• Black Girls and Girlhood II
• And more…

Cover art by Shikeith

This special issue contributes to studies of Black masculinities by centering the matter of vulnerability. It expands concerns about vulnerability in black masculinities studies from more spectacular forms of violence to consider the interior lives of Black masculine subjects and more quotidian and privatized forms of violence and violation. The essays explore a range of performances and expressions—(non)masculinity, feminine-aligned masculinity, mama’s boys, interspecies imaginings, and bereavement—to ask how Black masculinities are fashioned in an anti-Black, anti-queer, and gender-normative world. Through historical and contemporary examples that engage the fields of visual culture, animal, literary, performance, Black feminist, and Black queer studies, these contributions consider how masculinity is made or unmade by blackness and through the ubiquitous threat of gendered forms of anti-Black violence. 

The essays explore a range of topics:  proslavery and abolitionist discourse as a way to understand Black masculine vulnerability without likening it to feminization; poetic and filmic representations of black male life that radically refigure the animalization of Black people as a site of liberatory possibility; the association between Black masculinity and the Black maternal; vulnerability and intimacy in times and spaces of bereavement; and queer contingency—simultaneous freedom and risk that emerge from Black male gender subversion. Together, these contributions expose histories of anti-Black, misogynist, and homophobic violence, while imagining alternative modes of masculinity, blackness, and (post)human agency and subjectivity. 

The essays in this volume are appropriate for specialists and graduate students, as well as the general public.  The special issue will be of interest those engaged in the study of Black masculinities in the wake of Black feminist, queer studies, and trans studies and politics. It will be useful to individuals and groups interested in thinking critically about Black masculinities in the era of #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo movements.  We also hope the essays in this collection will reinvigorate the field of Black masculinities studies, and push both public and scholarly discourse about Black masculinities beyond simple dichotomies of toxic masculinity or Black male victimization. 

– Darius Bost, La Marr Jurelle Bruce, and Brandon J. Manning

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For a limited time, the introduction and “Uncertain Freedom: RuPaul, Sylvester, and Black Queer Contingency” by GerShun Avilez are free to download and read.

Support The Black Scholar by subscribing to print and digital issues here.

Upcoming 2019 issues include…

• Black Performance issues 1 & 2

Our 2020 volume, which is also our 50th anniversary volume, is slated to include…

• At the Limits of Desire: Black Radical Pleasure
• Black Girls and Girlhood (call for papers can be found here)
• Death of Black Studies?
• And more…

Cover art by Xavier Roache

This issue on Black Queer and Trans* Aesthetics is aimed at collecting avant-garde writing from Black queer trans scholars on the aesthetics of Black everyday life, Black art, and Black critical thought. The essays in this special collection are all focused on 20^th and 21^st century US Black art, frameworks, and aesthetics. The essay topics include archives of Black femme gender, unfinished music demos as sites of Black queerness, the relationship between bafflement and Blackqueer futurity in the work of Ayana Jackson, ethnographic work on Black queer kinship in San Francisco, and a review essay focused on the living archive of Lyle Ashton Harris.

The essays range in their theoretical and linguistic denseness, but all strive for accessibility to a general public in order to build an approachable body of work for, by, and about Black queer trans people across the Black diaspora. These stories of Black queer trans lives and aesthetic work are much-needed additions to the growing body and long history of Black queer trans artists, activists, lovers, scholars, thinkers, and organizers: our bodies, flesh, thoughts, and contributions matter in a world spinning on the axes of anti-blackness, transmisogyny, trans-antagonism, misogynynoir, and queerphobia.

These essays are appropriate for high school, college, and graduate students, as well as the general public interested in the intersection between blackness, queerness, transness, and aesthetic forms. We invite you to hold in-person salons, conversations, social media debates, and invite any of the writers or guest editors to speak with you and your community about the content of this issue.

– Elliott H. Powell and Shanté Paradigm Smalls

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For a limited time, the introduction by Elliott H. Powell and Shanté Paradigm Smalls and “Play Aunties and Dyke Bitches: Gender, Generation, and the Ethics of Black Queer Kinship” by Savannah Shange are free to download and read.

Support The Black Scholar by subscribing to print and digital issues here.

Upcoming 2019 issues include…

• Black Masculinities and the Matter of Vulnerability
• Black Performance issues 1 & 2

Our 2020 volume, which is also our 50th anniversary volume, is slated to include…

• At the Limits of Desire: Black Radical Pleasure (call for papers can be found here)
• Black Girls and Girlhood (call for papers can be found here)
• Death of Black Studies?
• And more…

We, the undersigned, express our solidarity with Dan-el Padilla Peralta, Assistant Professor of Classics at Princeton University, who was recently the target of a racist verbal attack during the conference of the Society for Classical Studies in San Diego. Born in the Dominican Republic, Professor Padilla Peralta is the author of Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League.

During one of the “Future of the Classics” panel, Mary Frances William, a white scholar, stated that professor Padilla Peralta got his job because he is “black,” according to a report by Inside Higher Ed. In addition to those vitriolic remarks, the conference “was quite the showcase for the enforcement actions of white supremacy,”according to a post by Padilla Peralta in Medium, which recounts another racist incident endured by two students of color at the annual event this year held at the Marriot hotel:

The day before the panel, Djesika Bel Watson and Stefani Echeverría-Fenn, co-founders of The Sportula and recipients of a WCC award at the annual meeting, were racially profiled by hotel security — possibly at the request of other conference-goers who were unsettled by the presence of brown bodies.

As students, scholars and activists, we condemn white supremacy and racism and extend our solidarity to both Djesika Bel Watson and Stefani Echeverría-Fenn.

These instances of racist and discriminatory practices in academic spaces are not new. Historically, white supremacists have dominated the Classics field in academia, constructing over time the myth of a so-called civilized and homogeneous ancient Europe by erasing the contributions of Africans, African-descended people, and non-white Europeans.

We call on writers, artists, scholars, scholarly organizations, students, and progressive organizations to express solidarity with Dan-el Padilla Peralta, Djesika Bel Watson, and Stefani Echeverría-Fenn and mobilize against racism in all its forms. Let us turn our discontent into collective action. Our message: Black and Brown academic work matters.

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Alexander Gil Fuentes, Digital Scholarship Librarian, Columbia University, USA

Amarilys Estrella, PhD Candidate, Anthropology New York University, USA

Amaury Rodriguez, Independent Scholar, USA

Amy M. King, Associate Professor of English, Director of Graduate Studies, St. John’s University, USA

Ana Liberato, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Kentucky, USA

Anthony Stevens-Acevedo, Historian, Higher Education Assistant (ret.), CUNY, USA

Anwar Uhuru, Assistant Professor of English, Harris Stowe State University, USA

April Yoder, Assistant Professor, History & Global Studies, University of New             Haven, USA

Arelis M. Figueroa, Master of Divinity, USA

Cornel West, Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy, Harvard Divinity School, USA

Daniel Huttinot, Activist and Editor, USA

David Marriott, Professor, History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA

DeLisa Brown-Guc, Graduate Student, The Open University, UK

Denise Paiewonsky, Associate Professor, Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo,   Dominican Republic

Dohra Ahmad, Professor of English, St. John’s University, USA

Edwin Rosario Mazara, Host of La Sala and Activist, USA

Elena Machado Sáez, Professor of English, Bucknell University, USA

Elizabeth Manley, Associate Professor of History, Xavier University, USA

Euclides C. Nuel, Activist and Journalist, Dominican Republic

Emmanuel Espinal, Esendom magazine, USA

Erik S. McDuffie, Associate Professor, Department of African American Studies and History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA   

Gabriel Brownstein, Associate Professor, St. John’s University, USA

Ginetta Candelario, Professor of Sociology, Smith College, USA

Ivette Romero, Professor, Marist College, USA

Jennifer M. Rodríguez, PhD Candidate in the Spanish and Portuguese Department. Princeton University, USA

John Keene, Professor and Chair of African American and African Studies, Professor             of English, Rutgers University, USA

Jomaira Salas Pujols, Graduate Student, Rutgers University, USA

Jordan Rogers, PhD Student, University of Miami, USA

Jossiana Arroyo, Professor, Department of Spanish & Portuguese, Department of     African & African Diaspora Studies, University of Texas, Austin, USA

Juan J. Ponce-Vázquez, Assistant Professor, University of Alabama, USA

Jubi Arriola-Headley, Graduate Student, University of Miami, USA

Kathleen Lubey,Associate Professor of English, St. John’s University, USA

Laura Bass, PhD Student, English, University of Miami, USA

Laura Chrisman, Professor, University of Washington, USA

Laurie Lambert, Assistant Professor, Fordham University, USA

Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Associate Professor, University of Michigan, Ann      Arbor, USA

Lico Enrique Agustin, Poet and Educator, Dominican Republic

Louis Chude-Sokei, Professor of English, Chair and Director of African American      Studies Program, Editor-in-Chief of The Black Scholar, Boston University,     USA

Mark Anthony Neal, James B. Duke Professor and Chair of African & African American Studies, Professor of English, Duke University, USA

Melissa Mowry, Professor of English, St. John’s University, USA

Michael D. Yates, Editorial Director of Monthly Review Press, Professor Emeritus,    University of Pittsburgh-Johnstown, USA

Michèle Voltaire Marcelin, Artist, USA

Miguel Vasquez, PhD Student, English, University of Miami, USA

Mildred D Mata, B.A. in Social Work, Dominican Republic

Natalie P. Byfield, Associate Professor, St. John’s University, USA

Nelson Ricart-Guerrero, Poet, France

Nelson Santana, Editor, Esendom Magazine, USA

Preston Stone, PhD Student, English, University of Miami, USA

Raj Chetty, Assistant Professor of English, St. John’s University, USA

Ramón A. Victoriano-Martínez (Arturo), Sessional Lecturer, University of   Toronto, Mississauga, Canada

Raphael Dalleo, Professor of English, Bucknell University, USA

Raquel Virginia Cabrera, Writer, USA

Robert (Bobby) Rivera, Assistant Professor of Theology, St. John’s University, USA

Robert Forman, Professor of English and Classics, St. John’s University, USA

Robin Wellington, Associate Professor of Psychology, St. John’s University, USA

Sandy Placido, Assistant Professor of History, CUNY-Queens College, USA

Shannon Hanks-Mackey, Managing Editor, The Black Scholar, Occupied dxʷdəwʔabš (Duwamish) land

Sharon Marshall, Associate Professor, First Year Writing Coordinator, St. John’s        University, USA

Sheridan Wigginton, Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies, California     Lutheran University, USA 

Sophia Blea Nuñez, Postgraduate Research Associate, Department of Spanish and    Portuguese, Princeton University, USA

Sophie Maríñez, Academic, USA

Steve Newman, Associate Professor of English, Temple University, USA

Sydney Hutchinson, Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology, Syracuse University, USA/Germany

Tarika Sankar, Graduate Student, University of Miami, USA

Tony Savino, Photographer, USA

Victor Arcturus Estrella, Artist, Dominican Republic

Wendy D. Roth, Associate Professor of Sociology , University of British Columbia, Canada

William García Medina, PhD Student, University of Kansas, USA

Yomaira C. Figueroa, Assistant Professor of English, Michigan State University, USAZaida Corniel, PhD, Lecturer, Stony Brook University, USA

Our final issue of 2018, “Returnings,” is now available. Featuring cover art by artist and teacher John Jennings, the issue includes an interview with Jennings that was conducted by Stephanie L. Batiste, Mary Anne Boelcskevy, and Shireen K. Lewis. Their discussion focuses on Jennings’s process of co-creating the 2018 Eisner Award-winning graphic novelization of Octavia Butler’s Kindred and includes unused draft panels and alternative covers. Stay tuned for an upcoming blog post of additional unpublished images.

The issue also includes “Revisiting the Gomez Imperative: Exchanging Our Country Marks and the Africana Studies Tradition, ASWAD, 2017” by Monique Bedasse, “Organized Disorder: The New York City Jail Rebellion of 1970” by Orisanmi Burton, “Blackness and Becoming: Édouard Glissant’s Retour” by Louis Chude-Sokei, and “The Political Legacy of Thabo Mbeki” by Sanya Osha. The editor’s note, “Black Studies Post-Janus,” was written by TBS associate editor Jonathan Fenderson.

For a limited time, the editor’s note and the interview with John Jennings are free to download and read.

Support The Black Scholar by subscribing to print and digital issues here.

Upcoming 2019 issues include…

• Black Queer and Trans* Aesthetics
• Black Masculinities and the Matter of Vulnerability
• Black Performance issues 1 & 2

Our 2020 volume, which is also our 50th anniversary volume, is slated to include…

• At the Limits of Desire: Black Radical Pleasure (call for papers can be found here)
• Black Girls and Girlhood (call for papers can be found here)
• Death of Black Studies?
• And more…

 

Jakari Sherman, the former Artistic Director of Step Afrika!, recently finished a two-year tour with The Migration: Reflections on Jacob Lawrence, of which he is also the director. Under Sherman’s guidance, the production brings the kinetic energy of step, tap, and other dance traditions to the famous sixty-piece collection of paintings that Lawrence finished at the age of 25. Engaging the movement of people with the movement of dance, Step Afrika!’s Migration begins by contextualizing Lawrence’s work within a narrative of the African diaspora to America: the talking drum in Africa, the turmoil of slavery and the theft of the drum, and the creation of new artistic traditions in the wake of these traumas. The first half of the production ends with a piece called “Wade Suite,” using “Wade in the Water” to emphasize the importance of the church as a site of Black American culture and spirituality. The second half directly enacts the iconic central images from Lawrence’s collection, including the extraordinary voyage North by train and the separation and reunion of families. Here, the number called “Trane Suite” tells of the journey of three men as they explore the cityscapes of the North along with their wives that join them. The production closes with a piece entitled “Chicago,” highlighting what the program calls the “collective self-transformation of those who made it North.”

Originally a commission from Washington, D.C.’s Phillips Collection, which holds half of Lawrence’s series, The Migration has taken Step Afrika! across the country. The production has received several awards along the way, headlining the Presidential Black History Month Reception in 2016 and appearing at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The piece is a triumph for Sherman, whose work as a dancer and dance educator—from competitions in his youth to studying ethnochoreology at the University of Limerick—has affirmed step’s vital place in American culture. As Artistic Director for the first professional company devoted to step, Sherman has dedicated his life to educating audiences about its unique history.

I talked with Sherman at a café in Washington, D.C., right as the current run of The Migration had ended.

. . . .

You’ve been traveling with The Migration for a while now. But you are based out of both Houston and D.C.?

Yeah, I’ve been going back and forth throughout this Migration tour, in town or on the road, traveling for the show. But Houston is my home.

And you just finished a run here in D.C.?

We did. We were at the Hartke Theater, which is on the campus of Catholic University. We were there for a two-week run, and it was amazing. We’ve been touring now for two years. We started in DC and we finished the run in DC. This is the end of The Migration for now, which is kind of bittersweet.

Now that you’re at the end of this run, would you mind walking us through where step began for you?

Growing up, I was into music and the sciences. Art through music essentially was my thing. I found my way into stepping via percussion. I was in marching band, and I found a love for stepping because of its rhythm. In Houston, competitive stepping during the early nineties was really big. I started off competing with my school step team and just found a love for it. Then I stepped when I went to college. During and after college, I went back and worked with children and the step team I had been in. They got noticed by the Houston Rockets and they asked me to form the first NBA Step Team. So that was the beginning of my professional stepping career.

I came to Step Afrika! in 2005, after joining them for a trip to South Africa in 2004. I really liked their work and it felt like I could contribute to what they were doing artistically. So, I came into the company in 2005, and by 2007, I was tapped to be Artistic Director of the company, and I did that for seven years until I went to Ireland for my Master’s degree. Shortly after I came back from Ireland, we began the Migration run.

That’s quite a journey. So many people get into step in college, but you were already well versed by the time you got there.

I think that discovering step in college has traditionally been the pathway. But at this point the youth stepping world has really grown, and there are stepping leagues now with a lot more people getting into step earlier in life. They are given access by members of fraternities and sororities who, because of their missions related to community service, were going out teaching stepping, like I did, in their high school or maybe their church or other community centers. So now there’s much more access to the form than there was.

What was it like getting your Masters in Ethnochoreology at the University of Limerick?

Going to Ireland and doing ethnochoreology was an important step in my own need to understand the tradition and art form of stepping in a greater way, as well as to lay the foundation for scholarly research connected to the form. In seeking to do graduate work here in the States, there was the challenge of not having formal dance training because most programs are based in classical ballet or modern dance. I didn’t come up through dance, I came up through drums and percussion and inheriting the tradition of stepping, so that was a challenge for me. I went to Ireland in part because of their tradition of percussive dance and in part because it was a welcoming place. I discovered a lot of similarities in Irish step dance culture and stepping culture, especially as it relates to competition, which has been the basis of the form.

Did you find it illuminating to study the ethnographic elements of choreography in an academic institution?

The folks who are really passionate about stepping, they’re really seeking to understand the art form more. They’re seeking a sense of legitimacy. I’ve always been seeking that, and one of the ways I did this was trying to get people to see stepping as an art form. Going to Ireland really helped me to problematize the idea of stepping as an art form, because doing so seeks to elevate it to a point where it’s just something that is done for entertainment. Going to Ireland helped me to recognize step for the tradition that it is, as a folk tradition beyond just being an art form. Because I think we try to elevate things to art to legitimize them.

What similarities or differences did you find in how ethnochoreology approaches dance relative to what you learned in Houston?

In our culture, stepping isn’t seen as something on par with the other legitimate art forms, so we seek to compare it to ballet. Going to Ireland really strengthened me to accept step for what it is, to present it for what it is, and to teach people about the parts of the tradition that are beyond the performative—and to use that to educate people about the form and why it’s meaningful to people. That sort of work is not even about establishing the legitimacy of step anymore, but as a byproduct of these efforts, the legitimation ends up happening.

Where are your studies taking you now?

I found Ireland to be a nurturing environment, and it really helped me to develop a greater sense of compassion for people as I’m studying everything that relates to dance. So now my research involves diving into the history of stepping, and I have a theoretical basis and framework through which to view that. It has given me a great position to now speak to people about the form and bring greater understanding—even for myself—about why we do what we do. It has helped me to explain where step comes from, and to dispel a lot of myths about stepping and its history.

What makes Step Afrika! unique as a dance company?

Step Afrika! was created to share the culture of stepping and to expose people to the art form, because early on the only people exposed to stepping were those in a fraternity or who were on a college campus where this was happening. Step Afrika!’s aesthetic is a blend of the whole of stepping rather than specific to one fraternity or one sorority. It’s evident when people come into the company—they come in with a particular style. Even when folks are not Greek, they maybe only stepped in high school or with their dorm, but they still have a very distinct style. When they join Step Afrika!, they have to break that and learn to engage with a lot of different step aesthetics. We are trying to represent all of stepping to the fullest extent possible.

Then there’s another layer of using step for narrative or even experimentally, like blending stepping with rock music or classical music or jazz, as you saw in Migration. And now we’re taking other forms, like visual art, and creating stories with all of these artistic mashups.

One of the things that was amazing about The Migration was that it involved step, tap, soft shoe, and European traditional dance. It was this amazing amalgam of recognizable Black dance, but it was also in conversation with European dance traditions.

We have so many different artists in the company, so many different talents. When we initially created the Migration in 2011, we ran it for a few weeks here in DC, building the show around the talents of the artists that we had at the time. We had tap dancers, we had modern dancers, we had a few West African dancers—and of course, stepping is the backbone of it all. So we built The Migration with those wide-ranging skill sets. We decided not to create everything based in stepping, forcing the whole company to learn and adapt to that, but instead asked how we could create work for the people that we have in the company to showcase their talents, and that’s how the show came to be.

But now that The Migration is established, you now recruit to fill specific roles?

Exactly. I think the development of Migration was an interesting process, a bit of growth and experimentation that landed really well with the company. Because we have so many people in the company, you don’t often get people who come into Step Afrika! who are really refined steppers. Most people do step for a couple years in college and that’s the extent of their stepping career. At most, someone would do it for three years, or maybe they learned in high school, but it’s not something they’re necessarily engaged in or practicing every day.

When you learn to step, it’s not like you start after school at 5.

Yeah, while modern dancers start when they’re three and then when they go to college there’s a whole curriculum available to them. There’s a learning and refining process that we go through in the company so we are able to incorporate these skill sets that people have honed over a long time and blend those with the stepping.

How did the production process of The Migration begin?

Brian Williams is the founder and executive director of Step Afrika! The Phillips Collection, here in D.C., was interested in doing something around the Jacob Lawrence series, and they had some conversations with Brian. They commissioned us to come up with something to connect with Jacob Lawrence’s work. It launched a period of research for me to just learn as much as I could about Jacob Lawrence and about The Migration, and that was the beginning of our work.

What proved to be the most valuable research for the production?

What was most valuable for me early on was spending a lot of time at the Schomburg in Harlem. There were some reference books that I used to study the series. But the first thing was just going there and reviewing archival material from the time period: some of the letters that were written from the people in the South to the people in the North, or the job postings calling people to come to the North. Those sources gave me texture, just looking at these old papers, they gave me a sense of the time period and allowed me to begin to create something that was—I hate using the word “authentic,” that’s such a problematic word—but something that I felt could connect to the texture of that time period. We knew that the through-line was Jacob Lawrence’s work and we knew what the narrative was, but how do we tie in the visual art with the stepping, with the music, with all these different dance styles? I think that early research really helped those elements to gel.

I was amazed by the ways your interpretation seemed to be responsive to Jacob Lawrence, the history of Black dance, and the existing repertoire of Step Afrika!

It was sort of kismet the way it all came down from the Phillips Collection. “Trane,” for example, was a piece that we already had been working on for a while, and “Wade in the Water” was part of Step Afrika!’s repertoire for a long time, and they just all fit together in the piece. We start with the drum on what we imagine is the west coast of Africa and then the Middle Passage section. And then all of the scenes lead up to the drums being taken away, and what that meant not only for art but for spiritual traditions. Drums and music were such a big part of spiritual traditions, as we see through “Wade in the Water” and the messages that were passed through African American spirituals, and this narrative was woven into the Migration story.

How do you interact with audiences that have never seen step?

We want people to know about the history of stepping, a dance form created by African American students. It’s percussive, it involves using our hands and our feet to make music. I think it’s important for people to understand that making sound, making music, and making gesture are equally important in the form. We are the music, essentially. These are just some of the identifying features about stepping that people see but maybe don’t always recognize. So we want to have people understand the tradition and that it comes out of fraternity and sorority culture.

One of the misunderstandings is when people try to connect stepping directly to Africa. A lot of people say stepping comes from Africa, whereas we would recognize the lineage of stepping in forms that originate in African culture or in the culture of Africans who were brought here. Stepping was created here in America, in part as a response to drums being taken away and the forms that evolved because of that. Those are some of the aspects of step that people don’t necessarily know about.

Do you get a lot of people who confuse step for tap?

Yeah, they look at tap dance and they’re curious about the connection. There’s a need to talk about the grammar and the language of stepping and what we call it. For the most part, people are very open to receiving knowledge about what stepping is.

Are there people who were originators or progenitors of stepping that you’d like audiences to be aware of?

It’s less about individuals and more about groups of people. We look at folks who were instrumental to the Civil Rights movement on their college campuses, and how their activism gave form to a lot of the fraternity and sorority culture. The way that they moved, the sense of militancy, gave form to a lot of the rituals and activities of fraternities and sororities. Those forms found their way into stepping. There’s a clear delineation when those movements started and how they changed the aesthetic of stepping.

There were folks who came around in the nineties in California who brought stepping to television. You have shows like School Daze and A Different World on television. You have these people who brought stepping to the forefront, but then there were all these folks who are sort of nameless, who were creating steps, who were the early choreographers who didn’t call themselves choreographers but maybe were step masters, who created a culture from which School Daze and A Different World could draw. Those are the real forebears of the form. We may never know their names, but I think it’s about honoring their legacy by sharing the stories and the lifestyles and the lives that they had to lead in order for us to have this tradition and this art form that we call stepping.

Where is your current research headed? What’s next for you?

I’m currently engaged in a project called Who Are the Step Masters? I am seeking to understand the history and the form of stepping through a search for the people who are important to the development of the form. I’m touring the country interviewing people of various ages. Right now, I’m focused on the older generations, those who would have been in college during the 1940s and 50s, who maybe were a part of sororities or fraternities and can tell me about the early days of the movement that evolved into stepping. I’m working on a photobook as part of that project, and a documentary play and documentary film. That’s where my time and energy are going.

What’s next for Step Afrika!?

Step Afrika! is engaged in figuring out the follow up to Migration. We’re asking what it is that we want to say at this point, how much we want to spin off from The Migration. We are interested in the story of the drum and the drum folk and how the drums were lost, but also how we have reclaimed the drum, whether it be through hip hop music or through other forms like the turntables or beat boxing. We’re looking at these as some of the starting points of the next production after Migration.

Thank you for talking the time to sit with me to discuss your work.

It was my pleasure.

 

Paul J. Edwards is a Lecturer in History and Literature at Harvard University and the book reviews editor for The Black Scholar.

Given our momentous political turmoil and a still unclear sense of what is to be done, our current issue “Pragmatic Utopias” features “Get in Formation: Black Women’s Participation in the Women’s March on Washington as an Act of Pragmatic Utopianism,” a thoughtful and deeply informative essay by Tehama Lopez Bunyasi & Candis Watts Smith. After all, if anything points the way forward—or orients us towards movement—it is clearly Black women’s thought and activism. This issue also includes Erik Gleibermann’s “Challenging the Stigma of an All-Black School: The Selma High Story,” a reflection on the legacy and possibilities of all-Black education in the wake of the failure of the “post-racial” and, arguably, of state-sanctioned multiculturalism. “We Are Not an Organically City People”: Black Modernity and the Afterimages of Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust” is an innovative essay by Pacharee Sudhinaraset that returns to the work of filmmaker Julie Dash through a post-Lemonade lens. Finally, the issue features Bernie Lombardi’s pointed interview with acclaimed queer Nigerian writer, Chinelo Okparanta.

For a limited time, we are offering free access to download and read the introduction by senior editor, Shireen Lewis, here. Readers can also download and read “Get in Formation: Black Women’s Participation in the Women’s March on Washington as an Act of Pragmatic Utopianism.”

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Upcoming issues include:

• Our final issue of 2018. Projected content includes the following:
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  • An interview with Eisner Award winning artist, professor, and frequent TBS cover art contributor John Jennings about his graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred
  • The Political Legacy of Thabo Mbeki, by Sanya Osha
  • Blackness and Becoming: Edouard Glissant’s Retour, by TBS editor-in-chief, Louis Chude-Sokei
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• Black Queer and Trans Aesthetics
• Black Masculinities and the Matter of Vulnerability
• Black Performance
• At the Limits of Desire: Black Radical Pleasure
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