Four dance teams shook the rafters at the ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance on March 1, 2025, as they competed for first prize in the 14th annual Steady Steppin’ Forward Competition. As hosts, the Williams step group Sankofa welcomed teams from four states for a loud and spirited evening, bringing the competition back to campus after a six-year hiatus.

The free tickets for the competition were all claimed shortly after they became available online, creating a full house for the 550-seat MainStage. To accommodate all those who wanted to see the show, organizer and Sankofa member Ian Dominic ’27 says the event was broadcast to an audience in the Paresky Center, and the online livestream had more than 300 viewers. Competing for the $750 prize this year were the ENVY Ladies from Tufts University, Standard Step Team from the University at Albany, UConn All-Stars from the University of Connecticut, and Mayhem Step Team from Muhlenberg College. Other performers were Sankofa, who “broke the stage” (performed first to warm up the audience) and a children’s step group from Pittsfield, Mass., called Youth Alive, who performed at halftime. Many Sankofa alumni also returned, including Maxine Lyle ’00, one of the founders of Sankofa who served as a judge this year.

Step—a body-percussive form of dance in which performers use their bodies and voices to clap, stomp and chant rhythms—originated in the fraternities and sororities of historically Black colleges and universities in the early 1900s as a way for the groups to connect with one another in sometimes discriminatory environments. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Africana Studies and competition co-judge Saroya Corbett says that step as a Black vernacular dance style incorporates elements of storytelling, invoking African diasporic dance practices where narratives are shared through movement. But largely, she says, the goal is to hype the audience and generate a call and response: “It’s all about the energy that happens in performance and how the storytelling can engage that type of energetic release that’s important.” An Afro-modern dancer herself—and a stepper as an undergraduate at Spelman College—Corbett describes step as “controlled exuberance, sharp and smooth; you get opposite function at the same time.” This year’s winner, ENVY, was selected, in part, for having “a really clean performance,” she says.

The last Steady Steppin’ Forward Competition at Williams occurred in March 2019. Sankofa co-president Aashi Mittal ’26 says performances paused when the campus shut down due to Covid-19, and regrouping after previous Sankofa leaders had graduated was difficult. Sankofa has always raised money to host the event, often including hotel and meal costs for their guests; additionally, they prepare the performance space for sound and lights and coordinate advertising, streaming, photography, stage logistics and more. Without peer guidance, Mittal says, “there was a loss of memory of what the event was and what it was like. And it was hard to express why it was so important to bring it back without ever having experienced it before.” The only step competitions she had seen were videos on YouTube. With encouragement from Sandra Burton, the Lipp Family Director of Dance, Sankofa got a little closer to reviving the competition each subsequent year. Mittal—a senior who is double majoring in chemistry and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies—was excited to see it all come together this year: “We think it’s important for step to be part of this community.”

The person responsible for the very first Steady Steppin’ Forward Competition in 2006 was Funmi Olosunde ’06, now president of Williams’ Executive Committee of the Society of Alumni. She began stepping in high school and competed with her team in tournaments across New York, continuing the practice in college by joining Sankofa for three of her undergraduate years. She recognized then that seeing Sankofa perform at Williams was many students’ first experience with step. “Some people thought that it was only Sankofa who did this,” she says, so she sought to bring other teams to campus—with the added element of those teams being judged for performance factors like technique, precision, costuming, and audience reaction. “Step as an art form is practiced everywhere in the U.S. and in the world. So it’s always good to have that exchange,” she says. The first step competition in her senior year was one of the first events staged in the then-new ’62 Center. As with this year’s show, the tickets were gone almost immediately, and the crowd was just as enthusiastic back then. In fact, Olosunde says, this year’s competition “had a lot of similar elements, like Sankofa breaking the stage, the judges—the structure of it was pretty much intact.”

Adds Corbett, “We have a culture at Williams College that is very call and response. It’s not often that you’ll see that in college audience environments [where] the audience just as engaged as the dancers onstage. That’s what fuels this type of dancing. I truly believe that is somehow cultivated in the student population to engage in call and response. I’ve seen it consistently in our student-focused dance performances, when [students’] friends are up there and they cheer each other on. It provides a wonderful support.”

Mittal was initially drawn to step in part because of the audience interaction. Performing with other step teams in the audience at the March event, she says, was “an unmatched experience,” but the more intimate experience of being part of Sankofa has had an impact as well: “We’re a team, but we’re also an affinity space and more of a family. There’s a pull toward spaces that are very safe and welcoming and made for Black people or people of marginalized identities.

“Even the name Sankofa,” says Mittal, “means reaching back while moving forward. There’s a lot of passing down—of steps, of memories, of things on the team that are really special.”

See a video of the evening below and a collection of photographs on Flickr, including some from a dance workshop led by former squad captain Sam Ojo ’22.

Photographs by Beneyam Hassen ’28

Regina Velázquez is an associate editor and senior writer in the Office of Communications.