The dancers flutter, imitating the wings of blackbirds painted by legendary artist Jacob Lawrence.
A dancer pirouettes, matching the pose in Lawrence’s portrait of a woman all dressed up and waiting on a train platform.
The music fades and dancers “become” a train, making the sounds of a locomotive, moving across the stage as if they were indeed a train on which thousands of African Americans rode from the South to the North in what is now known as the Great Migration.
In a collaboration between Step Afrika! and the Phillips Collection, two art forms meld, and then painted images seem to come to life — as if the dancers themselves were emerging directly from the panels that Jacob Lawrence painted for his famed “Migration Series.”
Inspired by Lawrence’s paintings, which are part of the permanent collection at the Phillips, Step Afrika! — an internationally acclaimed dance company that incorporates both rhythmic stepping and body percussion into its work — has created a dance performance that seeks to capture the mood, history and movement of the Great Migration. During the exodus that began in 1910, more than 7 million black people left the South to escape lives of sharecropping and poor employment, poverty and rampant discrimination. They headed to cities in the North in search of jobs and dignity.
Lawrence, who is often cited as one of the earliest researchers to document the Great Migration, meticulously laid out images, wrote captions, sketched panels, then used paint to render iconic portraits of men, women and children migrating, bent as if propelled to fly North.
“The Negro, who had been part of the soil for many years, was now going into and living a new life in the urban centers,” Lawrence wrote in one caption.
Composed of 60 panels, “The Migration Series” was meant to be seen as one continuous piece of work. In 1941, the series was exhibited in a solo show in Manhattan and Lawrence became a sensation. That year, Duncan Phillips, founder of the Phillips Collection, acquired the odd-numbered panels from the series. (The even-numbered panels were acquired by the Museum of Modern Art.)
The collaboration between the Phillips and Step Afrika! began when the dance company’s founder, C. Brian Williams, and the Phillips Collection’s director, Dorothy Kosinski, met in August while judging a synchronized swimming contest sponsored by the Washington Projects for the Arts.
After that first encounter, Kosinski invited Step Afrika! to perform at the museum for one of its evening events. Williams agreed, but wanted to go deeper. He had seen the Jacob Lawrence exhibit as it toured a few years ago and thought the subject of the “Migration Series” would go well with pieces in Step Afrika!’s repertoire.
I n January 2011, the pair sat down to discuss a more extensive collaboration. The Phillips would provide full access to the works of Jacob Lawrence, including digital images, as well as its archives, and Step Afrika! would translate the work into a dance performance. Soon after, Williams began extensive historical research, devouring information on the Great Migration at the Phillips and at the Schomburg in New York. He read letters from blacks who were hoping to migrate North and studied Lawrence’s paintings and the sources Lawrence may have used during his own research.
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