Step Afrika! stomps at Iona during national tour

Clare DeGennaro Staff Writer

Iona College hosted a performance of Step Afrika! in the Murphy Auditorium on Feb. 7.

This performance was sponsored by a host of campus organizations, including the Black Student Union, Gaels Activities Board, Student Leader Alliance for Multiculturalism, the Office of Residential Life and the Council on the Arts.

The performance was part of a series of cultural events scheduled on campus in February to celebrate Black History Month. Throughout this month, there will be initiatives, speakers and events celebrating the complex history of the black American experience.

Step Afrika! is a high-energy African-American dance group that performs the dance form of stepping. As the dancers explained onstage, stepping in America stems from dance traditions practiced by historically African-American fraternities and sororities, dating back to 1900.

Stepping also has roots in traditional African foot dances such as Gumboot, a dance form created by South African miners as a form of communication in the mines. Stepping depends upon the complete synchronization of dancers onstage. There is no music, other than the perfectly timed rhythmic stomps and claps that make up the dance. Because of this, the performers must be “in step” the entire time they are performing—sometimes in intense sequences longer than 10 minutes.

Much of the performance was narrated by Step Afrika!’s Kiera Harley, a mesmerizing dancer whose energy explodes out of a tiny, compact body. She and the only other female dancer, Deatrice Clark, were brilliant together in the first few sequences, which paid tribute to step dancing on college campuses.

This portion also included a competition between the men and women onstage. Each group performed their own step, and won based on the crowd’s reaction. Both the men and women earned wins from the cheers of the crowd.

Audience participation was an essential facet of the performance. Unlike some productions, the dancers not only encouraged the audience to cheer for the dances they liked, but gave specific cues and chants for the audience’s response.

The dancers of Step Afrika! were so committed to audience participation that they brought several audience members onstage to learn a basic step sequence.

Junior Justin Henry was invited onstage to learn the step.

“There’s a certain energy and power that you find with step performance, and it’s something I haven’t seen since my days of stepping in high school,” Henry said. “I was very excited to find out that Step Afrika! would be coming to our campus.”

Henry said that he didn’t expect some parts of the performance.

“I didn’t know that it was going to be an interactive performance until I got called onto the stage to participate in a performance,” Henry said. “It was an amazing experience and something that I haven’t seen on campus before.”

Step Afrika!’s performance was also a reminder of the expansion of Greek Life at Iona to include traditionally multicultural groups.

“I thought it was also a great way to integrate the Greek Life expansion, since stepping and strolling is such a major part of Multicultural Greek Organizations,” Henry said.

Stepping is an active and visceral dance form—the rhythms and beats from the stomping of the dancers resonate fully within the audience members, making it impossible not to be a part of the action onstage. Step Afrika! is a powerful group of talented dancers who merge the importance of history with pride for modern African-American culture.

For a full list of Iona’s Black History Month events, please visit http://www.iona.edu/BHM.