Fire and Ice

by Joan Acocella

The dance form known as stepping was invented by fraternities at black colleges around the nineteen-twenties. The students did these drills, presumably as a show of both power and togetherness, at initiation ceremonies. Eventually, stepping moved into the quad, where the houses started holding competitions, each trying to prove that it was the coolest. The competitions went public (see the 2007 movie "Stomp the Yard"). In its classic form, stepping looks like a cross betwen a military parade (tightly synchronized unison work) and African dance: syncopation, clapping, body patting, footwork like there's no tomorrow. Step Afrika!, which claims to be the first professional stepping company - it was founded by C. Brian Williams (Alpha Phi Alpha, Howard University, same house as Martin Luther King, Jr.) in 1994 - will perform on August 16, first in an afternoon "family" program, then in a regular evening show, as part of Lincoln Center Out of Doors. Outdoors is a good place for stepping, because this is a noisy art.