The Migration: Reflections on Jacob Lawrence (New York, NY)

Step Afrika!’s signature work, ‘The Migration: Reflections on Jacob Lawrence‘, charts the story of African Americans moving from the rural South to the industrial North to escape Jim Crow, racial oppression, and lynchings in the early 1900s.  Inspired by Jacob Lawrence’s iconic 60-panel “The Migration Series” (1940-41), this signature work from the award-winning dance Company uses the images, color palette, and motifs in the painting series to tell this astonishing story through pulsating rhythms and visually stunning movement. 

“Must we remain in the South or go elsewhere? Where can we go to feel that security which other people feel?” – A Colored Woman in Alabama, 1902  

DRUM CALL

Choreographed/Composed by Jakari Sherman and W.E. Smith
Original Recording of “African Villages” by W.E. Smith  

The drum has always been essential to African culture everywhere and is critical to the rhythm of Migration. Drum Call depicts an African village, the arrival of foreign ships, and the ensuing turmoil.  

GO WEST: circa 1730

Choreographed by Makeda Abraham, Mfoniso Akpan, and Delaunce Jackson

When Africans arrived in America, their music and dance traditions were ingrained in the culture. Go West explores how West African dance and drum traditions spread and maintained their vitality in the New World.  

DRUMFOLK

Choreographed by David Pleasant  

Drumfolk is a celebration of the early development of African American percussive traditions, including patting juba, hambone, and ring shout, giving way to art forms like tap and stepping. While exploring this heritage, Drumfolk reflects on the harsh conditions in the South that coincided with the practice of these transcendent musical forms. The work shows how the progression of such hardships preempted escape and migration, and how the fortitude of the enslaved led to the creation of new traditions like spirituals, field hollers, and shouts. 

WADE SUITE

Choreographed by Kirsten Ledford, LeeAnet Noble, and Paul Woodruff 
Vocal Arrangement by Greg Watkins 

Wade shows the continuity in African and African-American percussive dance traditions by blending the South African Gumboot Dance, tap, and stepping with the African-American spiritual. 

Movement One: THE DEACON’S DANCE
The African American spiritual played a significant role in lifting the spirits in troubled times. In The Deacon’s Dance, a deacon prepares for Sunday services.  

Movement Two: WADE
After the abolition of slavery, the church remained a center of refuge and community-building amidst the harsh conditions and served as a primary means of communication for industries recruiting labor during World War I. Wade highlights the importance of the church in helping African Americans survive the South, and its critical role in helping vulnerable people resettle in the North.  

INTERMISSION 

“I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown. I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns, and, perhaps, to bloom.” – Richard Wright  

TRANE SUITE

Original Recording of “Trane” by W. E. Smith  

Throughout the Great Migration, the train was an important means of transporting people to the North. The entire railroad industry recruited heavily in the South and thus, economically, became a primary means of African Americans’ “one-way ticket” to a new life. Named in reference to John Coltrane and paying homage to Duke Ellington’s Take the A Train, Trane is a journey in three parts, following the story of the Great Migration.  

Movement One: TRANE

Choreographed by Jakari Sherman
Creation of Trane made possible by the DC Jazz Festival.

The opening movement, Trane, establishes the connection between past and present: the rhythm of the train north, Ellington’s classic score, and the Alpha “train,” a time-honored element of stepping practiced by brothers of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc.  

Movement Two: OFF THE TRAIN

Choreographed by Jakari Sherman

Three men arrive in the North, luggage in hand…thrilled about the possibilities.  

Movement Three: MY MAN’S GONE NOW

Choreographed by Mfoniso Akpan, Aseelah Allen, Dionne Eleby, Kevin Marr, and Jakari Sherman
Recording of “My Man’s Gone Now” by Nina Simone

During the migration, it was common for men to journey north without their wives or children because of the high cost of travel. This left many women at home in the South caring for children and struggling to find work. My Man’s Gone Now is the story of three women, each in a different phase of their transition to the North and ready to be reunited with their loved ones.  

CHICAGO

Choreographed by Jakari Sherman  

Between the 1910s and 1920s, more than 400,000 African Americans left the South for many Northern and Western cities, including Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Seattle, Los Angeles, and New York. By the end of the 1920s, that number exceeded 1.2 million.  

Chicago finds the migrant’s new rhythm in everyday situations.  It is a percussive symphony using body percussion and vocals to highlight the collective self-transformation of these brave men and women once they arrived “Up North.”