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Aicha Diaby: The Student President Who Took Phenomenon to the Apollo — and Made Sure the Team Outlasted Her

In 2023 she told Dance Mogul she wanted her legacy at Cornell to be community, not trophies. Three years later, the freshman she brought to the Apollo is running the team.

By Dance Mogul Magazine | Originally published April 30, 2023 | Updated and expanded September 2026

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Aicha Diaby — Harlem native, first-generation Cornell student, and president of the Phenomenon Step Team.

A Harlem Girl on the Apollo Stage

Some of the most important people in dance are not the ones who become famous. They are the ones who keep a room open. Aicha Diaby was a first-generation college student from Harlem, a senior at Cornell University, and the president of a ten-person step team that almost did not have enough dancers to compete. In April 2023 she got four of them onto the stage of the Apollo Theater.

Dance Mogul Magazine interviewed her days before that performance. She talked about auditioning for her middle school step team and not making it. About giving up stepping through high school for sports, then finding it again at a pre-college summer program. About designing garments that could hold her identity as a Black Ivorian Muslim woman raised in Harlem. And about what she wanted to leave behind — which was not a trophy.

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The 2023 Dance Mogul Interview

Originally published April 30, 2023. Reproduced in full.

Dance Mogul: How did your step journey begin?

Aicha: My stepping journey began in middle school where I was introduced to step. I auditioned for the team in 6th grade but didn’t make it. Luckily for me, the team became a club the following year and I was able to join.

Dance Mogul: Why did you decide to finally take stepping seriously?

Aicha: I decided to take stepping seriously because I missed it so much after not doing it in high school. I was focused on playing sports during high school, so I never had the time to step. I attended a summer program before my freshman year of college where I put on a step routine for the talent show with my peers. I received so many compliments and praises for my stepping routine that it made me realize how much I wanted to return to stepping.

Dance Mogul: Tell us about achieving at a prominent school like Cornell University.

Aicha: Honestly, I don’t think I often realize how much I have achieved at Cornell. First and foremost I am a first-gen college student and that in and of itself is a major achievement. It’s hard to notice your achievements when everyone around you is excelling tremendously as well, but once you are aware of your accomplishments it is one of the best feelings ever.

Dance Mogul: What have been some of your favorite moments stepping has brought you?

Aicha: Some of my favorite moments from Stepping are the cheering of the crowd after a performance and the comments from my peers about how much they enjoyed the performance. It brings me joy that stepping doesn’t only bring joy to me but also to our audience. I also love the goofy moments in practice and just having fun with my teammates overall.

Dance Mogul: How are you balancing your senior year as you prepare to graduate and step into the world?

Aicha: It has been hard balancing my senior year with my extracurriculars, but when you love something and enjoy doing it you somehow manage to make everything work. What has really helped me to stay grounded and balance my senior year are my friends and advisors. They have been extremely supportive and helped me so much in overcoming the challenges I was facing. Making sure I make time for my social life is also how I have balanced my senior year.

Dance Mogul: What advice do you have for the upcoming generation of steppers?

Aicha: I would tell the upcoming generation of steppers to live in the moment and have fun. Stepping is a means of artistic expression and they should fully embrace that aspect of it.

Dance Mogul: Tell us about your current projects.

Aicha: I am working on a few projects for my fashion classes. My goal with the designs I’ll be creating is to create two ensembles that represent the intersection of my identities as a black Ivorian Muslim woman who was born and raised in Harlem. I want the two ensembles to portray who I am and where I come from. I’ll be implementing elements from my West African culture as well as the culture of Harlem. Another project is the 2023 NCPA Step Dance Championships. I am working on a routine with my teammates and figuring out the logistics so that we are in attendance.

Dance Mogul: What would you like your legacy to be with stepping?

Aicha: I would like my legacy in stepping at Cornell to be building a sense of community. I want to create an inclusive team where anyone feels welcome and comfortable.

Dance Mogul: What does the Apollo mean to you as a Harlem native and a performer?

Aicha: As a Harlem native, the Apollo Theater is the heart of Harlem. It is a cultural hub that brings life and joy to the neighborhood. As a performer, it is such an honor to be able to stand on the same stage as many significant African American figures. In a way, I will be adding to the legacy of the Apollo.

Dance Mogul: Is there anyone you’d like to thank for helping you own your journey?

Aicha: I would like to thank my teammates, friends, advisors, and staff at UpStaged. They have all been pillars I can lean on in different parts of my journey, whether it be my social life, my academics, and being a part of the 2023 NCPA Step Dance Championships.

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What She Left Out: She Was the One Holding the Team Together

Reading that interview back, one thing stands out. She never once mentioned that she was the president of the team, or how close Phenomenon came to not making it to Harlem at all.

Reporting published by The Cornell Daily Sun that same month fills in what she left out. Phenomenon was founded in 1997 as Cornell’s only step team unaffiliated with Greek life, and by 2023 it was down to roughly ten members who rehearsed twice a week and performed five or six times a semester at events like Relay for Life and the African Dance Repertoire showcase. Diaby, its president, attributed the decline to a combination of graduating classes and the pandemic.

The championship required a minimum of four dancers per team. Phenomenon struggled to reach even that, because academic commitments kept several members from traveling. In the end four went: Diaby, vice president Bintou Sow, and two underclassmen, Keenbelynn Bellande and Marie Cajoux. Two days before the Apollo, the team performed live on Ithaca’s ABC affiliate. Each competing team was also paired with a charity that would share in any prize money; Phenomenon was matched with the Boys & Girls Club of Harlem — sending a Harlem native back to Harlem to compete on behalf of Harlem kids.

She told The Sun the team was not focused on winning so much as on learning from a room it had never been in before. And she named the thing she actually wanted, in six words: “I want Phenomenon to live on.”

That is the sentence this update exists to answer.

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The Apollo, April 22, 2023

The 2023 National Step Championships at Harlem’s Apollo Theater, produced by our partners at UpStaged Entertainment Group.

On April 22, 2023, the best high school and college step teams in the country descended on the historic Apollo Theater to compete like athletes for the title of National Step Champion. The championships were produced by our partners at National Collegiate Performing Arts (NCPA)™ and National High School Performing Arts (NHSPA)™, with the high school division co-produced by World of Step. At stake was a share of $13,000, All-American status, and the recognition of their peers.

The eight collegiate teams were Cornell, Delaware State, Howard, Lincoln, Mercy, Syracuse, and both a men’s and a women’s team from Tufts — with the Tufts men’s team, BlackOut, returning as defending champions. Selection had begun the previous fall through submitted video judged on precision, synchronization, creativity, and overall performance. On the high school side, a bracket competition drew more than 38,000 votes to pick four semifinalists. More than 150 steppers competed. The format ran like a tournament: division champions, a Final Four, and head-to-head step-offs.

Phenomenon did not come home with the crown. What the record does show is that a four-person team from a club that nearly could not travel stood on the Apollo stage against programs many times its size — and that UpStaged published a full photo gallery and video playlist of their performance afterward, describing a team that left everything on the stage.

There is a historical detail that makes her night in Harlem land harder than she may have realized. Stepping’s modern lineage runs through Black fraternities and sororities — and in the early 1900s, Alpha Phi Alpha at Cornell was among the pioneers of both Black Greek life and step. The campus Diaby represented at the Apollo is one of the places the art form was built. She carried it back to the theater that made Black American performance legible to the world.

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Where Is Aicha Diaby Now?

Phenomenon lived on

The answer to her one stated wish is yes. Phenomenon Step Club is still a registered student organization at Cornell University, still describing itself as the only non-Greek step team on campus, and still framing its purpose around carrying percussive dance traditions — including the South African gumboot lineage — into an American stepping context.

The detail that matters most is on the team’s leadership page. Keenbelynn Bellande, one of the two underclassmen Diaby brought to the Apollo in 2023, is listed among the club’s current officers as co-president. Student rosters change every year and this reflects what is publicly posted rather than a permanent state of affairs. But the shape of it is unmistakable: the outgoing president used the biggest stage her team would ever see to give the experience to someone young enough to inherit the room. Three years later that person is holding the keys.

That is what succession looks like when nobody is watching. It is also, precisely, the legacy she asked for — not a championship, but a team that still exists.

The scholarship behind the sewing

In the interview she described designing two ensembles to hold her Ivorian and Harlem identities together. That was not a casual hobby, and the public record shows the thinking underneath it.

A year before we spoke with her, Diaby published an essay for the Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection examining African wax print textiles. Working from a blue-and-white Nigerian print in the university’s archive — a pattern carrying a map and star motif that became popular around Nigerian independence in 1960 — she traced the fabric’s history and the pressures facing the trade today. She framed it through her own experience: shopping for wax print with her mother as a child, and noticing years later how sharply the price per six yards had fallen, then asking what that collapse actually signifies for the industry and the people in it.

That essay tells you what kind of designer she was training to be. Not someone borrowing West African print as decoration, but someone who went into an archive, read the scholarship, and asked who profits. Her academic path reflected the same breadth: an Interdisciplinary Studies major with minors in Fashion Studies and Entrepreneurship & Innovation.

An honest note about this update

Dance Mogul Magazine does not track the private lives of the people we interview. Aicha Diaby was a college student when we featured her, not a public figure, and everything above comes from the public record: her own published writing, journalism about her team’s public performances, and her university’s own organization pages. We have not gone looking for where she works or lives, and we will not.

So the section usually reserved for career milestones stays open here, deliberately. If you are reading this, Aicha — the invitation stands. Tell us what you built. We will publish it, and the archive will be better for it.

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What Her Example Means to the Next Generation

Most young dancers will never found a company or copyright a technique. Far more of them will be handed a struggling team, a thin roster, and a room that only stays open if somebody does the unglamorous work. That is the story here, and it is the more useful one.

1. Getting cut is a beginning, not a verdict

She auditioned in sixth grade and did not make the team. She joined the next year when it opened up, came back to step after leaving it entirely for years, and ended up leading a college program onto the Apollo stage. The rejection is in the record because she put it there. Note how early in the interview she volunteers it.

2. Bring the underclassmen

She had barely enough dancers to qualify. She could have filled those four slots with her strongest seniors and chased a better result. Instead half the traveling squad were underclassmen — dancers who would still be on campus long after she left. That single choice is why the team survived, and it is the most transferable thing she did.

3. Define winning before you compete

She said out loud, before the competition, that the goal was to learn from a room the team had never been in. That is not lowered expectations; it is choosing the metric you will actually be judged by. Teams that only measure trophies dissolve when they lose. Hers did not.

4. Study the culture you perform

Before she designed a garment from West African wax print, she went to a textile archive and researched where the cloth came from and who is being squeezed in its trade. Any dancer working in a tradition they inherited — step, gumboot, hip-hop, tap — can do the equivalent. Knowing the history is what separates honoring a form from decorating with it.

5. First-generation students should count the win

Her most quietly devastating line is about how hard it is to register your own achievements when everyone around you is excelling too. First-generation students at elite institutions carry that constantly. She named it, and then named the antidote: knowing what you accomplished is one of the best feelings there is. Young readers in that position should take the permission.

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What Happened to Step Itself

The world Diaby stepped into that night has changed considerably. World of Step, which co-produced the high school division of the 2023 championships alongside our partners at UpStaged, has since been recognized as a national sports league in the United States, backed by Sports ETA and recognized by the Buffalo Niagara Falls Sports Commission, with thousands of athletes competing nationally. In 2026 it expanded again into a unified league housing multiple competitive platforms.

In other words, the argument Diaby’s generation of college steppers was making with their bodies — that this is a discipline deserving stages, structure, and respect — has largely been won on the institutional side. We documented that arc in our updated feature on Jessica “Remo” Saul, the choreographer and educator who built the written language and the league behind it, and in our conversation with Lizzie Seedhouse of UpStaged, whose whole premise was that student performers deserve to compete like athletes.

Diaby is part of the evidence for that premise. She is one of the dancers who showed up when the infrastructure was still being built.

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Why It Matters to Dance Mogul Magazine

Dance Mogul Magazine has documented dance culture, history, and community since 2010, and a large part of that work is refusing to only cover people once they are famous. Most dance media waits. We interviewed a college senior three weeks before she graduated, because what she was doing mattered while she was doing it.

That is the whole argument for an archive. In 2023 this was a short conversation with a student stepper. In 2026 it is the primary record of who led Phenomenon through its thinnest years and got it to Harlem — the kind of detail that vanishes completely if no one writes it down at the time. Our Archive and our Exclusive Interviews exist so that dancers hold their own history in their own words.

Her story also sits squarely in our Empowerment mission, and it stretches what empowerment usually means in dance coverage. It is not always the spotlight. Sometimes it is a first-generation student from Harlem, running a ten-person club, deciding that the point is to leave the door open behind her. Our coverage of the competition circuit takes student performers seriously as the foundation of the industry, not as filler before the professionals arrive.

We were proud to publish her in 2023. We are prouder to be able to report that the thing she asked for actually happened.

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The Story Continues

There is a version of this article that would have been a disappointment to write. Aicha Diaby was not a professional dancer heading for a company contract. She was a senior about to graduate into the rest of her life, and step was going to become a thing she used to do. By the usual logic of dance media, the story ended in May 2023.

Except it did not, because she had not been building a career. She had been building a room. Phenomenon was down to a handful of dancers, wounded by the pandemic and by ordinary graduation, and it would have been entirely reasonable for a busy first-generation senior to let it wind down on her way out. She did the opposite. She grew the performance schedule, got the team onto television and then onto the Apollo stage, made sure underclassmen were in the four seats that mattered, and said plainly that what she wanted was for the thing to survive her.

It survived her. Cornell still has a non-Greek step team, and one of the students she took to Harlem is now helping run it. Somewhere in Ithaca there are dancers stepping in black Timberlands who have never heard her name, which is the most complete form of success a leader can have.

To every young dancer who has been handed something fragile: this is the job. Keep the room open. Bring someone younger than you. Say out loud what you want to leave behind, and then go leave it.

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