A few days ago I had to admit a humbling deficit of knowledge about contemporary pop dance culture. While listening to NPR, I heard a story about a racial controversy surrounding the winner of a stepping contest, called the Sprite Step Off. Stepping? Wha??? I’d heard of clogging, hip-hop, Irish step… How did I miss Stepping? Obvious answer: I’m not in a black sorority or fraternity. My loss. Turns out, Step is Big Time in the African American college world! Coke thinks it’s so big they are giving away 1.5 million in prize money in the Step Off this year. MTV has created a mini-series about the competition. And, like other parts of the contagiously fun and cool black culture, white girls and boys want in on it.

That was just the opening salvo of the intriguing world I have just gotten to know a little better.

Here are the basics of the controversy. A white sorority beat out a black sorority for the first time in the competition and was awarded first place, stunning everyone who had to confront the fact that (some) white girls (can) have rhythm. A brouhaha ensued that is typical in our racially charged, media driven culture. It was fascinating to read about the responses to the white challengers on the black website, The Smoking Section.

More interesting for me than the passing debate about who Step belongs to and who was best at it, is Step’s intriguing history. Listen to this story on NPR from 2003.

Here’s a good description of Step :

Stepping is tap dance without tap shoes, James Brown without the music of the JBs, Cab Calloway sans piano, a marching band without John Philip Sousa. It is jazz, funk, rhythm and blues, and rap without instruments. Stepping is lean and mean. The music comes from the sychronzied interplay of hands and feet, from chants and hollers. It is a way to make music using the body as instrument.

Doing research for this blog, I became interested in the various influences that have led to Step. Hambone is a rhythmic performance of knee, thigh and chest slapping. There is a strong connection between hambone and step. Check out the Hambone Bothers. You’re  also gonna love the Overall Man .

In South Africa, during the period of oppressive apartheid laws, wellie-wearing gold miners, in order to communicate with each other, created a dance with strong similarities to hambone and patting juba called the Gumboot Dance .

Going back in time, Hambone is connected to Hand Jive as well as early Rock ‘n’ Roll.

Johnny Otis laid  out his stuff in the 1950′s, with some very overweight women who might not have had the maneuverablilty to show the moves at their best.

Take a loving look back at the elegance of The Four Tops to see their  syncopation refined to an art form.

A dance called Pattin’ Juba was popular in the mid 1800′s. It was a complex cross pollination of black folk culture and Irish jig.  In the 1840′s, a free black man named William Henry Lane, took the stage name Master Juba and became the greatest dancer of his time. He was so highly regarded that he was eventually allowed to perform in minstrels alongside white performers (unheard of at that time).  He combined the rythmic communciations of African slaves, Irish reel dances, clog, and other dances popular in his era, into what is now acknowledged to be the invention of tap dance.

This brief summary is hardly meant to be the last word on Stepping, just a small part of my continuing education as a life long student of the ever fascinating, ever evolving world of dance.