During the last hour of practice, the crew reviewed and rehearsed four or five other numbers, and different teachers cycled through the front of the room. I’ve never been privy to the world of dance and can barely handle the Cupid Shuffle, but the energy in the room was enough to make me want to hop up and shake what my momma gave me. Despite groans of “oh my God it’s only 10 o’clock,” and “the song is how long?” spirits remained high, and the atmosphere was contagious. Everyone laughed when a petite blonde girl up front sunk to the ground in a near-split and asks “Are my feet too far apart?”
But once a routine clicked, the dancers transformed, their faces ranging from sassy pursed lips to brows furrowed in concentration, their bodies moving in nearly perfect unison, beautiful and mesmerizing.
Express yourself
“There’s not a wide variety of African-American artists here who put themselves out there,” said Remy St. Claire, a 29-year-old hip-hop artist, of Charlottesville’s art scene.
St. Claire’s involvement in the arts started when he joined the Zion Union Baptist Church choir at age 8. He quickly fell in love with singing, dancing, and performing, and as a teenager he joined a youth step team, where he learned traditional African step and dance moves and hopped around to nursing homes and church events to perform every chance he got.
St. Claire has dabbled in poetry and other fine arts, and has been performing hip-hop since age 13. Despite his passion for rap, he said he understands why hip-hop music and dance haven’t been embraced as art forms: The entitled, violent culture around so much mainstreamed hip-hop music makes people afraid. He and Cooper see the Best of Both Worlds as a chance to change that, to reinvigorate hip-hop by bringing it back to its roots as a form of expressing positive African-American roles. St. Claire called hip-hop and stepping “kissing cousins,” and said the modern fusion of the two makes cultural and artistic sense.
“It’s bridging two totally different styles. But they’re similar in a lot of ways: the rhythm, the unification, the feeling, the movement,” he said. “It’s living art.”
Unfortunately, he said, there’s still a stigma around hip-hop, and he worries that the culture’s roots are getting lost in the materialism of mainstream rap music.
“My concern is that it’s going to lose all consciousness. It’s going to lose the heart and soul of the struggle, which is where hip-hop came from,” he said. “That’s what hip-hop is about. It’s about ‘this is a struggle, and I can survive.’ It’s not about flaunting what you have.”
By presenting hip-hop and step together, St. Claire believes Best of Both Worlds can help reinvigorate the soulful side of the art form he loves that helped keep him on the straight and narrow.
“If I didn’t have all this to fall back on when I was younger, I would have been in a heck of a lot more trouble,” he said.
Athena Bannister, a member of the sorority Zeta Phi Beta at UVA, has volunteered as one of the girls’ coaches for about a year. She described herself as a hyper kid who had a hard time sitting still, she said, so dancing has always been her first love and an outlet for her to express herself. Once she got to college, she added stepping to her artistic resume, as it is an integral part of her sorority’s culture and identity.
“I don’t really feel like they’re that completely different,” she said. “With dancing you let the music control you, but stepping is different in that you have to make the beat and make sure it’s on point. But they’re both just a way of expressing yourself through movement.”
In order to stay in the program, the girls are required to maintain at least a 2.5 grade point average, and cannot have more than two behavioral issues at school per semester.
“Since last year I’ve seen a tremendous change in the girls,” she said. “I don’t think many people had faith in them, but we saw potential in them.”
With the inception of the team came a struggle to get along, what with so many age groups represented and no prior experience in stepping. But the teamwork and discipline instilled in them through weekly practices and regular performances seems to be transferring to other areas of their lives. Many of them are taking on leadership roles in school, Bannister said, and the older girls are beginning to step up as role models for the little kids.
“They’re doing more than just teaching them how to step,” Bellamy said of Bannister and her sisters. “I’ve seen these girls grow from being very rambunctious and all over the place, to growing into little women.”
Sixth grader Destiny Grady was one of the original steppers when the group was established three years ago. She’s only 12, but is captain of the team, and often serves as liaison between the kids and adults involved with the team.
“We have some arguments sometimes, but we’re like family,” Grady said.
With her seniority comes the understanding that a group of girls is going to have its ups and downs, and she takes it upon herself to keep herself and her teammates involved and motivated.
“The teamwork is hard sometimes,” she said, and didn’t deny that there have been days she’s thought about quitting. “But when I start something, I wanna finish it.”
An honor roll student at Walker Elementary, Grady loves math and science, and said the step team isn’t unlike school in some ways.
“Math is like step,” she said. “You have to learn all different kinds of things before you get to that goal, or that answer.”
Best of Both Worlds is just around the corner, and the girls admit they’re nervous to compete alongside college students and more experienced teams. But when they step on stage at the Paramount in their freshly-pressed uniforms, they’re part of something bigger.
“The cultural piece of it, the relevance, the historic factor of it all. I don’t know how to explain it,” Bellamy said. “It’s us.”
Between acts at this year’s Best of Both Worlds Dance & Step Competition, host Remy St. Claire will facilitate a discussion on race, discrimination, and identity, and invite kids in the audience to come up to take the mic and share their own experiences. The effort is being led by the Dialogue on Race—the city’s initiative to engage the community in ongoing discussions of racism and diversity—and event planner Ty Cooper said he hopes it will open up new venues of communication.
“People from Friendship Court and Glenmore may not be talking to each other, but we want to get them talking at the competition,” Cooper said. “And then we can’t all just go back into our bubbles.”