Chicago Dance Makers Forum Lab Artist 2020

Sterling Lofton aka Steelo has been working to tell the story of Chicago footwork, a battle dance and music with roots in the 1980s, since 2014, when he co-founded The Era Footwork Crew on the south side. Now, he consciously uses the footwork practice to tell additional stories. His process interacts with Black culture archives, fits pieces of history into choreography, costuming, and aesthetics, and is the rare bridge for Chicagoans in Greater Grand Crossing, where Stony Island Arts Bank is based, Pilsen, home of the HCL studio, and everywhere in between.

The Project

Lofton is deploying the HCL residency to build a performance that in a myriad of ways convenes and connects people to their history. He has named the work as Sterling Publishing Company (SPC) after Johnson Publishing Company (JPC), for eighty-four years the largest black-owned publishing company in the world, founded in Chicago and managed by John H. Johnson and his family until it closed in 2019. The story of JPC is the thread Lofton uses to build an innovative art process for himself, to sustain his dance and fashion work, and for the whole community, to support the culture.

His essential strategy for Sterling Publishing Company, the project, is to create synergies, modeling Johnson’s for JPC. The JPC publications and television media reached people of color worldwide with everything from arts to journalism and cooking. The EBONY Fashion Fair was not only the world's largest traveling fashion show , for decades it employed hundreds of Black talents and channeled proceeds to millions of college students.

Some of the research questions for Sterling Publishing Company inspired by JPC are: how do fashion and dance affect and reflect Black history? What are today’s common struggles for the workers in these sectors? How does one choreograph for footwork on the runway, create moves based on fits, fabrics and folds? He is studying the ties between the clothing industries and the textile history in the American south, while exploring how people move in cotton, synthetics, even 3m reflective tape. He is testing on choreography his experimenting with sewing patterns. At the same time he is training to make clothing, from apprenticing and classes, such as by Sheila Rashid and Xochil Herrera Scheer.

Lofton’s clothing, scenic design, choreography for Sterling Publishing Company, the performance, is directly influenced by EBONY and JET magazines he is reading at the Johnson archives at Stony Island Arts Bank, which is also the location for the event. On the former bank lobby floor and surrounded by artwork from Rebuild Foundation’s collection, he imagines the performers on a runway with audiences on either side. Longtime collaborators Wills Glasspiegel and Brandon Calhoun are shooting and editing a series of shorts to serve as interludes between the live performance pieces he plans. Another long-time collaborator, Morris “DJ Spinn” Harper, is creating the original soundtrack with Lofton.

Artist Bio

Sterling Lofton (aka Steelo) is a 2020 Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist, and has been performing and making footwork dance since the two-thousands, when he was a teenager growing up on the south side of Chicago. In 2014 he cofounded The Era Footwork Crew, which has toured internationally including to Japan and Peru. He performs, sets work, writes the lyrics, and recently is making the costumes for The Era, notably for IN THE WURKZ (2019), which received a National Dance Project award by the New England Foundation for the Arts and for which Lofton also created the costumes. He has started the streetwear line, Stitched by Steelo. He was featured as the dancer on AT&T’s “312” campaign with city-wide distribution. His dancing has appeared in industrials and several documentaries about footwork, through prominent outlets such as VICE, Canadian Broadcast Company, and the Chicago Tribune.

Lofton is also a dedicated educator. His footwork classes include the values of self-care and supporting women and girls. He has led footwork workshops and given talks about the history in New York, Kuwait City, and London, using the invitation to promote the Chicago community and address inequality and racism. He is co-developer of the footwork curriculum for Open the Circle, a youth summer camp started in 2018 in South Shore by several footwork collectives. He also co-teaches filmmaking, fashion, self- empowerment, and making electronic music as part of Open the Circle.