From the first minutes of Step Afrika’s Saturday afternoon performance at Sidney Harman Hall, the troupe’s most obvious assets were apparent: Their synchronization is airtight, their sense of rhythm is failsafe, and they’ve got a likable, impish sense of humor.
But it’s only after seeing their concert in its entirety that one can appreciate a perhaps more important quality. These step dancers are committed to a dual mission of preserving the traditions of their art form while also taking risks in an effort to propel the genre forward.
Jason Nious’s “Ke Nako” is a short, tightly knit piece of choreography. It’s performed in dim lighting that makes the dancers’ faces barely visible, a gambit that forces the audience to focus on the sounds and not on the visuals.
In addition to contemporary, American-style stepping, the group presented two works that it learned on a trip to South Africa. One of them, “Ndlamo,” was based on traditional dances of the Zulu tribe. Intensely percussive and endearingly boastful, one could see clear lineage from this style to stepping.
The second, “Isicathulo,” was a gumboot dance. This form of dance was developed by South African miners who passed the time by tapping out rhythms on the rubbery footwear they wore to protect their feet. It is remarkable to see how closely it resembles the stepping we’re accustomed to seeing stateside.
For “nxt/step:Jazz,” the dancers ditched their casual-cool jeans and caps for sleek white suits and canes. They were joined onstage by saxophonist William E. Smith, an interesting twist since the sound score for stepping is often composed of only the dancers’ slaps, claps, stomps and shouts. The music seemed to inspire choreographer Jakari Sherman to experiment with more complex spatial configurations and to more fully develop themes and patterns within the movement. But the dancers didn’t seem as comfortable in this more formal, buttoned-up style as they did in works that had a spirit of feistiness and mischief.
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