The Migration: Reflections on Jacob Lawrence is far more than just a highly acclaimed dance-theater production. When the multimedia show from Washington, D.C.-based dance company Step Afrika! lands at Cal Performances’ Zellerbach Hall Nov. 2–3, it will be an opportunity to reflect on current global concerns about immigration.
Born in 1917, the American artist Jacob Lawrence, whose paintings are brought to life in this production, began working for the Federal Art Project (a program established under the New Deal) in his early 20s. He was no stranger to illustrating facets of African American history, having already painted several multi-panel series about Frederick Douglass, Toussaint L’Ouverture, and Harriet Tubman. When Lawrence received a grant from the Rosenwald Foundation in 1940, he embarked on the 60-panel The Migration of the Negro, later called the Migration Series, which was completed in 1941, when he was only 23 years old.
Lawrence’s conception of the series was as a single, unified work. To ensure that the 60 separate paintings were consistent in feeling and color, he worked on them simultaneously, using pure, unmixed casein tempera paint. A sentence-long caption for each panel clarifies what is being depicted. Together, paint and words form a narrative of the Great Migration, the movement of African Americans out of the Southern United States in the first decades of the 20th century. “I tried to show the excitement, the crowds, the tension, through the use of color, through the use of shapes, forms,” Lawrence said in later years. “I tried to get a surge of movement in this particular work.”
In 1942, the series was divided into even and odd numbers, with the 30 even-numbered panels going to The Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the 30 odd-numbered to The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. The full series is infrequently shown except in special exhibitions.
The first wave of migration that Lawrence depicts began in the early 1910s, when demand for industrial workers increased in the Northeast, Midwest, and West, as fewer immigrants were arriving from Europe. Some 1.6 million African Americans from the rural South fled to those urban centers, lured by the promise of higher wages. Driven also by a crisis in the cotton industry caused by the boll weevil, rampant racial discrimination, lynchings, and Jim Crow laws, the migrants discovered, however, that they had to deal with overcrowded living conditions and a different style of discrimination in the North.
C. Brian Williams, founder and executive producer of Step Afrika!, strongly suggests that “if audience members have never seen the Migration Series, they should go online and check it out before they come to the show. It will really give some context to [the company’s production]. First, they’ll see the artwork [online], and then they’ll be able to see and experience it in a very different way on the stage. That’s an excellent primer.”
Williams wears many hats at Step Afrika!, a company where stepping is the primary dance form. In his mode as choreographer, Williams made the first iteration of The Migration in 2011. “We created it in a small 200-seat theater in Washington, D.C., which was our then-home. It was so successful that when the show closed, I personally did not want it to end.” So in 2016, he created an expanded version.
“The expansion of The Migration,” Williams admits, “was one of the craziest ideas I’ve ever had, while also being one of the easiest. It’s so strange how this become our signature work. I had always known Jacob Lawrence’s work, loved it as a child and as a student at Howard [University]. To be honest, as an artist, I didn’t think it was even possible that we would get access to interpret his work.
“When I met the director of The Phillips Collection, I said, ‘You know, I want to interpret the Migration Series.’ And she said, ‘Sure.’ I couldn’t believe it. The Phillips Collection became an important partner in the recreation of this work. When we first made it, we only had access to 30 of the panels. But for this current production, we had access to all 60.
“It’s a universal story, although this one is focused on African American migration from the South to the North. The images that Lawrence painted look like Ellis Island in the 1900s. They look like our southern border. They look like Asian immigrants. Migration is something that touches us all.”
Williams didn’t start dancing until he was in college. He laughs, “My mother always says that if she had known I was going to start a dance company, she would have put me in a dance class.
“I’m from Houston, Texas, but I went to school at Howard. I was not involved in dance, but I was always involved in the arts, mostly theater and music. I learned how to step when I pledged to my fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha. I performed in some step shows on campus and became really intrigued with the form and saw that it was under-recognized.”
Williams continues, “I had studied business and marketing at Howard, but when I graduated, I didn’t want to do corporate. I wanted to be in the arts. So I got a fellowship to live and work in Southern Africa, where I got the idea to create Step Afrika! in 1991.
“I moved to Johannesburg for three months in January 1994. That’s where I met the [members of] the legendary Soweto Dance Theatre. The founder, Jackie Semela, is like the Alvin Ailey of Southern Africa. I learned a lot about stage performance and dance from Jackie. Sadly, he was killed in Soweto [in 2003].”
The conjunction of Southern African dance styles with the African American stepping tradition opened Williams’s eyes, and from there, his company took off. By its very existence, Step Afrika! embodies themes of migration.
Unlike Williams, Mfoniso Akpan, artistic director of Step Afrika!, has been dancing since she was 3 — everything from tap, ballet, jazz, and modern to African dance and step. But she had another equally strong interest. “I attended the Bronx High School of Science, where I did many electives and projects in the hard sciences — molecular genetics, biochemistry, along those lines.”
After enrolling at SUNY Stony Brook, where she majored in biochemistry, she joined the sorority Delta Sigma Theta as a junior and worked on her stepping. “Through a sorority sister, I met a member of Step Afrika! who said, ‘I think you’d be great for this company.’ I decided to take a chance and went to the audition and ended up making it. I like to say there’s an art to science and a science to art. For me, there’s just a merger, not two separate entities. They’re kind of fluid. That’s how my brain works.”
Akpan first thought she’d be with the company for two years and then go back to school. But at the end of every year, she would hear where the company would be touring to next and would decide to stay another season. It’s now been 19 years, 10 of them as artistic director.
“I thought about going back, maybe going to med school, but really and truly, Step Afrika! has afforded me the opportunity to grow within the company. I get to do what I love and to pass the torch to the next generation of dancers as well. We always say, ‘Once a Step African, always a Step African.’”
Of the stories told in The Migration, Akpan says, “We’ve been able to bring them to life. We employ the use of live drummers, vocalists, a saxophonist, and a flutist. So all of these elements come together with the dancers and those magical paintings.
“When you look at the history and the cultural significance of stepping, it’s important to represent that art form correctly. It started really with the Stono Rebellion of 1739 in South Carolina. Because of how significant the drum was, the Negro Act was passed in 1740 to ban its use. The enslaved people decided to put the rhythms and beats into their bodies. Stepping really evolved after African Americans were finally allowed to go to school for higher education. The rise of fraternities and sororities in the early 1900s contributed to the emergence of stepping. Stepping is such a community-based event. When it comes to the college campus experience, you’re not just a spectator. You’re a part of the performance as well. It’s not only about the movement, the visual. It’s also about what it sounds like.”
Akpan continues, “A lot of people would say that stepping came directly from Africa. But that’s not exactly the case. The South African gumboot dance is so similar to stepping that some believe that stepping must have come directly from it. There are similarities, especially when it comes to the oppression that both groups were under and the percussive nature of those two art forms. [But they] developed independently yet in parallel. The rhythms of the drum are embedded in the DNA. When we’ve done culture exchanges with different groups in Africa, they understand. They get it. When it comes to dance, culturally, everybody can be a part of it. We may not speak the same language verbally, but when it comes to the movement of the body, we are.”
