Step Afrika!: The Migration: Reflections on Jacob Lawrence
About This Event
Step Afrika presents The Migration: Reflections on Jacob Lawrence at The Joyce Theater, a program created in dialogue with Jacob Lawrence’s visual narratives. The company applies stepping’s percussive vocabulary, with elements of South African gumboot dance, to translate Lawrence’s flat planes, strong geometry and compressed narrative scenes into movement that emphasizes narrative clarity and rhythmic precision.
About The Migration: Reflections on Jacob Lawrence
At The Joyce Theater, Step Afrika! presents *The Migration: Reflections on Jacob Lawrence*, a dance work in dialogue with Lawrence’s painted chronicle of the Great Migration and the Black communities shaped by that movement. The performance traces departures, labor, and collective survival through percussive footwork and ensemble patterning, with Lawrence’s visual language as a frame rather than a script. In New York, where Lawrence lived and worked in Harlem, the piece lands as local history as much as national memory. Its clearest insight is how rhythm can function like reportage, carrying detail without narration.
About the Artists
Step Afrika!
Step Afrika! is a nonprofit dance company centered on the African American practice of stepping, shaped by touring, residencies, and workshop-based education. Their work blends the percussive vocabulary of stepping with elements drawn from South African gumboot dance, using the body as an instrument.
Jacob Lawrence
Jacob Lawrence is an American artist whose work has long been a reference point for stage makers exploring Black history and daily life in Harlem. He described his visual approach as a form of cubism shaped by African and Mesoamerican sources, built from flat planes, strong geometry, and compressed narrative scenes.