By Margaret Hicks
Eagle Staff Writer
mhicks@theoklahomaeagle.net
“Step” is a true-life story of the Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women (BLSYW) and its step team: – Lakira Anderson, Shanice Barkley, Yakema Barkley, Trachya Biles, Tamar Dennis, Brooke Dixon, Blessin Giraldo, Cori Grainger, Domonique Hall, Diamond Hill, Lakiya Jackson, Najia Johnson, Amanda Leonard, Naysa Reames, Kaila Rice, Jabria Shade, Tayla Solomon, Tyrina Sneed, Adajah White and Nush Zweh. It also features key faculty and staff from BLYSW including Director of College Counseling Paula Dofat and Step Team Coach Gari “Coach G” McIntyre.
The Director
This film was directed by Amanda Lipitz, who, at least one year before the school or step team existed (2008) help found the school. Lipitz, a Baltimore native, was the producer of Broadway’s “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” at age 24. Lipitz seized the opportunity to give back to her hometown. She reached out to her mother, Brenda Rever, a longtime women’s issues advocate who was a product of Baltimore city schools and knew how many lives could be impacted by creating a school that championed young women.
The film premiered at Sundance to much acclaim. It won the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Inspirational Filmmaking and even found itself in the middle of a studio bidding war, which, as Deadline noted, is rare for a documentary. Fox Searchlight ultimately paid upwards of $4 million for the rights to the movie.
The School
Together with about 30 local volunteers, Rever led the movement to open the doors to BLSYW. In 2009 the school opened, offering 120 spots, by lottery, to the initial class. It was a class of sixth graders. The school’s motto: transforming Baltimore one young woman at a time.
The school’s goal was to have every member of their senior class accepted to and graduate from college.
In June of 2016, 60 members of that inaugural class became the school’s first graduates. Through the leadership of amazing faculty, staff, and parents – some of whom are featured in the film – they had together achieved a 100 percent college acceptance rate, earning more than $800,000 in scholarships and more than half were about to become the very first member of their families to attend college.
The Stars
Blessin Giraldo, Cori Grainger, and Tayla Solomon are the stars of this story. And their story is every girl’s story.
Blessin, the talented team leader who formed the step team when she was a sixth grader, has a dynamic stage presence but off stage she feels stuck. Stuck at school, stuck at home, and stuck with a young man who does not understand her desire to go to New York and follow her talent. She excels at stepping, but academically it is a battle to keep up her grades. She wants to get into a college that will take her away from home.
Then there is introverted Cori, a straight-A student who graduated valedictorian and set her goal on a long-shot scholarship to her dream college, Johns Hopkins University, which costs $50,000 per year. “I don’t have $50,000” were her fears. Sometimes her mother is an embarrassment to her at step practice.
Tayla’s vision of herself is that she is just “a notch down from Beyoncé” in her skills. Her mother, a single parent is a correctional officer who takes on the step team’s success as her mission.
The Story
This story takes place against the background of the heart of Baltimore. It opens, like
“Detroit”, with a riot scene. Nothing out of the ordinary, just another black man who was killed. History records it like this: “On April 12, 2015, Freddie Carlos Gray, Jr., a 25-year-old Black American man, was arrested by the Baltimore Police Department for possessing what the police alleged was an illegal switchblade under Baltimore law. While being transported in a police van, Gray fell into a coma and was taken to a trauma center.”
Their story is not unique. It’s any black woman’s story who lives in a ghetto and is looking for a way out. Patti Labelle, Nona Hendryx, and Sarah Dash sang about it in a song back in 1974: “There were others, like any ordinary’s mother’s daughter trying to make it own her own…It’s just an all-girl band, dealing with the facts and the pain…”
Ntozake Shange wrote about in her poetic monologue For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enough, But Moved to The Ends of their Own Rainbows.”
What Is Stepping
Step dance defined, “is the generic term for dance styles in which the footwork is the most important part of the dance. Limb movements and styling are either restricted or considered irrelevant.” However, the Lethal Ladies, as they call themselves, don’t live inside that box. Though step dancing is characterized by using sounds made by the shoes striking each other and the floor to create audible rhythms, “Making music with our bodies” is how one of the high-school step dancers in the film described her group. After all, it was a sixth grader who gave birth to this team.
Step dancing is found in many cultures. Riverdance – Lord of the Dance (Irish step dancing) found its way to Broadway.
However, traditionally, in black culture, step-dancing, also called “stepping,” was popularized by the National Pan-Hellenic Council (NPHC), a collaborative organization of nine historically African American, international Greek lettered fraternities and sororities; also known as the “Divine Nine”. The NPHC was formed as a permanent organization on May 10, 1930 on the campus of Howard University, in Washington, D.C.
The Movie Review
“Step” is an inspiring success story. The success of a school that set a goal for itself and its students and achieved it. The success of students who set a goal to graduate from high school, and get into college with a financial package that they could live with. The success of parents who wanted something better for their daughters than they had.
You can’t argue with success. There is nothing to it, but to do it.
David Kimble of Circle Cinema had this to say, “That movie really inspired me. I loved it. Definitely my favorite film of the year so far!”
Where Are They Now?
Blessin completed her freshman year at Baltimore’s Coppin State University, where she double majored in business marketing, graphic design and communications.” Coppin is one of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).
Blessin had this to say: “I know exactly what I want to do. I want to be a business mogul, helping you figure out why your sales are steady or why they’re declining or decreasing. With graphic design, I’m not only good with creative arts, but visual arts as well. I like to draw, so I’ll be doing things from being a creative director for a commercial to a billboard to redesigning your website to a logo to a business card. And with communications, I’ll get your business on the radio, on TV. I could also help with radio personnel if I wanted to, to get you to know the right celebrities, into the right parties and right endorsement deals. Just help your business grow.
Tayla completed her freshman year in Huntsville, Ala. at Alabama A&M University, also an HBCU, where she is studying Urban Planning with a minor in Political Science. Tayla had this to say: “I didn’t really make any friends, at first, because I didn’t really know how to, because I had the same sisters for seven years, going on eight now. It was really difficult for me. But the spring semester, I made some friends, opened up more, and now I know how to balance my social life and my academic life.”
Cori completed her freshman year at Johns Hopkins University, a private Baltimore school where she is studying computer science and international studies with a minor in Spanish. She had this to say: “My first semester was a really big transition for me academically,” she says. “I didn’t really feel like I was prepared for all the rigor that Hopkins had to offer. I went from being a big fish in a small pond at BLSYW. I graduated valedictorian, but at Hopkins, it’s the exact opposite environment, where everybody graduated as valedictorian.”
