Baltimore girls take a crucial ‘Step’ to higher ed
Dance group kept students on track to attend college
Let’s hear it for the girls. This summer has been a triumph for women, from the unstoppable Wonder Woman (officially summer’s biggest hit, raking in $789 million worldwide to date) to Charlize Theron’s butt-kicking Atomic Blonde.
But the blockbuster season is ending on an equally powerful, low-budget true story from Baltimore with a different superhero weapon at its core: education.
“The greatest superpower you can have is your mind,” says filmmaker and Broadway producer Amanda Lipitz, whose new documentary, Step, hits theaters Friday (in Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, San Francisco and Washington; expands nationwide Aug. 18).
The Sundance Film Festival hit goes where scripted stories this summer have not: into the inner city of Baltimore. The protagonists are high school seniors at a rigorous charter school that aims to have every student accepted to college — and many are the first in their families to go.
Their bond is step, a dynamic performance tradition that uses the body as both a percussive and expressive instrument. The young women’s alter ego? They call themselves the Lethal Ladies of BLSYW (Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women).
The teens come from low- income homes where covering basic needs such as food and electricity is “incredibly challenging,” says Lipitz. Her cameras followed them into school and the gym, where the step dance team practiced.
The extracurricular activity came with strings, requiring a 2.0 GPA — and daily school attendance.
As a school rule, “if you miss school, you miss step practice,” says Lipitz, who calls the strict policy a “life raft” for team members like recent graduate and team captain Blessin Giraldo, who “even at 11 knew she needed something to keep her connected to school — and that was her way of doing it.”
Lipitz filmed the teens for years, but found the strongest content came from the students’ junior and senior years, when those who had put in the work came under consideration from colleges like Johns Hopkins and Alabama A&M, and those who had not faced a probable life sentence in poverty.
Since filming ended a year ago, the three protagonists highlighted — Giraldo, Cori Grainger and Tayla Solomon, all 19 — have remained in college.
What’s more, the graduating class of 2016, the Baltimore school’s first, earned $800,000 in college scholarships. The women filmed also were granted individual scholarships from film producers (Lipitz declined to specify the amount) after the film sold in a bidding war for $4 million at Sundance.
In Step, such determination is marked over 90 minutes, as the girls opt to do more than survive — they choose to stomp, study and thrive.
The result is pure black-girl magic on the big screen.
Their experience culminated in May, when the Lethal Ladies performed on the fly for Michelle Obama at a college signing day event.
“They actually do a step called ‘The Michelle Obama step.’ It’s all about ‘ when they go low, we go high,’ ” says Lipitz. “After they were done, she put her arms around all of them.”
“The greatest superpower you can have is your mind.” Amanda Lipitz