For Southland College Prep High School students Will Walker and Jadyn Erves, participating in the school’s stepping team helps them both fuel their competitive streak.
The Richton Park school will host a stepping competition Saturday and, recognizing Black History month, the competition celebrates the tradition of stepping, rooted within the competitive schoolyard song and dance rituals practiced by historically Black fraternities and sororities beginning in the 1900s, according to the school.
Step or stepping is a form of percussive dance in African American culture. The participant’s entire body is used as an instrument to produce complex rhythms and sounds through a mixture of footsteps, spoken word and hand claps, according to the school.
Sixteen high school and middle school squads from the Chicago area as well as Indiana and Missouri are expected to compete. The top prize for the best high school team comes with a $1,000 prize, and a $500 prize awaits the best middle school squad.
Corey Levy, Southland College Prep director of operations, is also Kappa League director and oversees the stepping team.
“It takes a lot of dedication,” he said.
The Kappa League is the national youth initiative of the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity, of which Levy is a member. The Southland College Prep Team travels throughout the state to various high school step competitions, usually coming home with the top award.
Because Southland College Prep is the host school, the Kappa League Step Team won’t compete, but the team will present its performance, which is expected to draw more than 1,000 people, including step squads and viewers.
It’s a combination of competitiveness and camaraderie that’s appealing to students such as Walker, a 16-year-old junior.
“Me, I’m a very competitive person, plus, it brings people together,” Walker said Wednesday before a demonstration of the team’s stepping performance. “It brings all of us closer and helps form the brotherhood we’re trying to make.”
“I love it here,” he said.
Erves, 16, a sophomore, said the competitiveness of competition is also a draw for him.
“It’s just getting the trophy, the award,” he said. “It’s the excitement from everybody after we win.”
The school’s squad will perform its “Phantom of the Step Show” routine, a variation on “Phantom of the Opera,” involving costumes and walking canes that, along with stomping, become musical instruments during the performance.
Both Walker and Erves are in the music program at Southland Prep, so they knew each other before becoming part of the Kappa League program.
Both said Levy has been a mentor, and Erves said he has known Levy since Erves was in the fourth grade and Levy was assistant principal at Indiana School in Matteson Elementary District 162. Levy was also principal at the district’s Huth Middle School.
“He has been keeping my grades straight, keeping me focused on school,” Erves said.
The step squad puts in long hours, practicing six days a week, usually about two hours after school each day and on Saturday mornings.
Between keeping up on school work, taking part in music and participating in step “it’s a very delicate balance,” Walker said.
“Over time you find that balance,” he said.
Over months of practice for their performance, Walker and Erves said, there are always tweaks to the show they present, even something as small as the order of certain steps.
“Those first few months before the first show, it’s running it, running it to get it down,” Walker said. “There’s always room for improvement, and we always want to give the best show possible.”
According to historians, a South Carolina slave rebellion in the 1700s, in which the slaves beat drums as they walked down the streets, led to the banning of drums and the development of enslaved African Americans using more percussive dances, as the body replaced the drum, and became known as juba, step’s precursor.
In the early 1900s, step evolved into what it is today when African Americans started attending colleges and universities and formed fraternities and sororities, according to Southland College Prep.
Levy said that being part of the step team and the Kappa League helps young Black men gain the sense of camaraderie that they might find if they choose to join a fraternity in college.
“The step team was started to give everybody a sense of belonging,” Levy said. “It teaches our young Black men that in order to succeed you have to be disciplined.”
