In June, I attended Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., for their production of “The Migration” featuring the multitalented performing company, Step Afrika. Step Afrika! is currently celebrating its 30th year as the “world’s leading authority on the art form of stepping” in this moving and energetic production.
Through dance, drumming, singing and instrumentals, “The Migration” traces the Black exodus from the American South from 1910, a generation that was barely removed from enslavement, as people move in search for safety, greater educational and economic opportunities. The paintings, patterns, textures and themes of Harlem Renaissance artist Jacob Lawrence inspire the patterns, color, movement, rhythm and steps of the troupe, while fragments of Lawrence’s works are projected onto the set.
It’s a tour-de-force multimedia experience that can’t help but sweep the audience up in its percussions. Quite literally. At the end of the performance, the troupe leads the audience in a call-and-response with the audience, alternating chants of “Alright?” “Okay!” Okay?” Alright!” until everyone is on their feet chanting, clapping and dancing along.
I loved it. But then, I’m a total theater nerd. And a time traveler.
As such, I’m obsessed with how history impacts us in the present. I was particularly intrigued with how Arena brings the audience into those themes from the moment we enter the lobby, at intermission, and after the finale, to engage the audience by use of:
Exhibits showing historical maps, photos, stories and archives from the Library of Congress on the Great Migration
Context for Jacob Lawrence’s life and work
Setring the Great Migration into historical perspective
To me, though, it was the setting of an enormous map of the world, a backdrop for a video photo booth. This allowed audience members an opportunity to actually walk through their own family migration patterns. Examining movements and moments, great or small, that may have carried each of us to be present at this stage at this time.
A welcome invitation, as I am in the process of exploring my grandmother’s “coming to America” story as part of another historic migration, when entire Jewish communities in Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire were forced from their homelands. Finger-walking the map gave me a chance to realize how radical it was to uproot her life from the family in her tiny shtetl by foot, by cart, by steamship, and finally perhaps, by riverboat, to a distant, unknown metropolis, Cincinnati, Ohio, thousands of miles from all she had ever known.
It would have been a journey of faith. Not necessarily her Jewish faith, or a faith in the Divine, or even the faith that my grandfather, her intended, from that same small shtetl in what is now Ukraine to the bustling metropolis of Cincinnati, ironically for a woman who kept kosher then known as Porkopolis, in the mythical land of America.
No, it was faith in her ability to navigate on her own, at 18, for the very first time.
I never heard my grandmother’s voice. She was in her eighties by the time I was born. She’d had a series of strokes that left her bedridden. And unable to speak.
As I am starting to discover in the process of uncovering her journey, there is not much data to go on. Hard to find records of her crossing from Hamburg, Germany to the U.S. in 1893. No written family stories or oral histories of a time she obviously went to great efforts to leave behind. Challenges involved in tracing her steps when outside actors and their destructive hatred had a stated goal to erase them.
To erase her from memory.
I am intent on remembering, if only to lift my grandmother’s voice after a lifetime of silence.
My question to you: where did you come from? What trials—and joys—come from the journey from there to here? From then to now?
What’s your family migration story? What memories do you carry forward from the past?
In our world where everyone’s always “moving forward,” do our pasts still matter?