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The journey of the founding class of the step
troupe at the Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women shows
the girls' struggles in the aftermath of protests and rioting in
the city where 25-year-old black man Freddie Gray died after
suffering a broken neck in a police van in April 2015.
Stepping is not actually a dance, said Cori Grainger, one of the
film's lead subjects, because it does not use a beat. Instead,
"you are the beat, you are the music, you use your hands, you
stomp your feet, you clap, it's spoken word," Grainger told
Reuters.
As the girls juggle their academics with competing in step
tournaments, they visit Gray's memorial where their step coach
tells them, "as African American women, we are considered bottom
of the barrel." The visit inspires the girls to perform a Black
Lives Matter routine, which they end with their fists in the
air, chanting "It could have been us."
"We began to use step as a platform to talk about things that
were most important to us, so we used our themes to educate
people while we entertained them," Grainger said.
"There are just rampant misunderstandings about the Black Lives
Matter movement in this country and seeing these young women
stand up and say 'it could have been me,' it feels different,"
added the film's director Amanda Lipitz.
The charter school attended by the girls aims for a 100 percent
graduation and college acceptance rate, a goal that challenges
some of the film's protagonists.
Grainger hinges her hopes on a full scholarship to Johns Hopkins
University as her family struggles financially while another
girl, Blessin Giraldo, has to face the consequences of her low
grades amid a difficult home life. Tayla Solomon clashes with a
mother determined to keep her on the right track.
"I think a common misconception is that urban communities don't
really have kids in them who have big dreams and hopes,"
Grainger said.
"So many of us are capable of doing big things, but how can we
make a change in the world if we're never given the experience
or the opportunity to?"
(Reporting by Piya Sinha-Roy; editing by Diane Craft)
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