Tropic Sprockets / Step

Tropic Sprockets / Step

By Ian Brockway

Music and gesture are universal tools. These expressions have the power to lift us up and to tell stories. In times of crisis, sound and motion together can be transcendent both as a healing agent and a problem solver. This is the case with the pleasing and warm documentary “Step” by director Amanda Lipitz.

Stepping is a percussive form of art in which the body is used to create a mix of sound, motion and hand-clapping. It is widely found in Greek university organizations, both sororities and fraternities and it is often dramatic with frequent chanting.

The film centers on three girls on the step team of the Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women, during their senior year.

It is 2015. Times are stressful. Freddie Gray was recently shot by the police. Guns are everywhere and there have been recent rioting and unrest. “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!” is an all too prevalent chant. Blessin Giraldo lives with her mom who has had her ups and downs. Giraldo is a talented dancer but she can’t seem to focus. Sometimes anger and impatience threaten to derail her. Still, she lives for dance. As Giraldo says, “Step is life.”

Cori Granger is also very motivated. She yearns for Johns Hopkins when she graduates. There is only one major block: money for tuition.

Tayla Solomon is also driven but her police officer mother notices her grades decending and suspects one thing: a boyfriend.

Each one of these girls work incredibly hard at step, but they find themselves under duress (often through no fault of their own) and step becomes the only way to change their personal circumstance.

Though it has its share of drama, both personal and public, the story is by no means heavy or syrupy. It is vibrant, vivid and never self righteous or predictable.

The film has a beat and an irrepressible charm that well keep you compulsively transfixed.

Blessin, Cori and Tayla possess the charge of pop music celebrities under the gaze of a camera that loves them and they truly love to move.

The rhythm of the film quickly turns into a kind of real life suspense story though, when the girls learn that no scholarship is certain and working steadily makes only part of the luck. There is also a bit of danger when it becomes known that Blessin is jealous and is tempted to physically strike Tayla.

Stepping becomes the only constant and it is clearly the binder that holds this group together.

The girls have one last chance to prove themselves in the regional step contest.

This is a bright, sound-filled and vivid documentary. If at times it is breezy with less stepping then one would hope for, the domesticity as illustrated is dynamic and telling with pulse and heart.

The novel thing about “Step” is that by the end of the film, you will know Blessin, Cori and Tayla with a real intimacy not just as young women, but as artists.

Write Ian at [email protected].

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