Aesthetic Foundations & Activist Strategies of Intervention in Rickerby Hinds' Buckworld One

"Every generation wants to re-create their reality...Now it's our turn...Welcome to our world...Welcome to Buckworld" (Buckworld One). How to effectively create transformation, whether artistic, political, socio-cultural, individual or all of the above, has yielded a great many debates, theories and practices. Performance, including dance, are but two artistic modes of social movements that have been widely recognized by a variety of scholars, including Robin D.G. Kelley, Paul Gilroy, Thomas DeFrantz, Jill Dolan, Yvonne Daniel, and others, for the important transformative work they do. Following in their footsteps, this article will focus broadly on the cultural work of krumping (1), an Africanist aesthetic dance style that originated in Los Angeles in the 1990's, and how it functions, specifically, for social change within Buckworld One, a hip hop theatre performance, which took place in 2010, in Tempe, Arizona. I will also examine how krump intervenes in both the official and discursive realities of the American Dream and acts as a catalyst for social Justice in these contexts. As Robin D.G. Kelley's work Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination documents, there have been many social movements that have envisioned and attempted to move themselves and others toward a more just world or "planetary humanity" (Gilroy 2). Buckworld One is an example of such a revolutionary (2) work that at the least envisions, and at the best enacts a better world through/in performance. Much of the power in Buckworld One rests in the responsive Africanist aesthetic dance style of krump to speak to/through the body politic of contemporary USAmerica (3). Krumping "Krump" is a contemporary style of hip hop dance, characterized by an aesthetic energy of asserting bodily presence and power through the physical articulations and interactions between performers and spectators. Since its origins, just before the turn of the twenty-first century, krump/KRUMP/krumping/krump dancing/buck/BUCK/ krumpography has extended its reach from the barrios of Los Angeles to the suburbs of middle USAmerica, with stops along the way within the music videos of Missy Elliot, Madonna, and others; in various Hollywood movies, such as Rize; and on such television shows as the popular, "So You Think You Can Dance" (SYTYCD). It has also spread globally to Japan, Germany, South Africa and other countries, through USAmerican popular-culture media; through cyberspace on You Tube, various krumping websites and chat rooms; and via widely distributed how-to-videos. The manner in which krump's aesthetics are racialized, gendered, classed, and sexualized changes with the contexts in which it is practiced, for what purposes, and by whom, as well as with who is "reading" the practice, whether they be fellow krumpers, other community members, popular culture viewers of SYTYCD, or consumers of music videos. Krumping, as an embodied Africanist aesthetic practice, functions uniquely in different contexts for different purposes. Originators of the style, and current practitioners of the style in the US-America and around the globe, register specific investments in and expressions of krump aesthetics and krump cultures. Krump originated in Los Angeles from a dance form known as clowning (4). Tommy Johnson, aka Tommy The Hip Hop Clown, created clowning in the mid 1990's, as a means to entertain and provide youth an alternative to becoming involved with gangs and violence. Some of the youth who had danced with Tommy developed krumping, a more hard hitting, spiritual, "aggressive and personal style," where dancers were able to work through difficult emotions of anger and pain in the dance circle (Zanfanga 342). Both dance styles were featured in Rize, a 2005 music video-style documentary film, produced by fashion photographer, David LaChappelle. Even though several other film attempts had been made to document clowning and krumping, Rize rocketed krump into heightened visibility in popular culture through the lens of Hollywood. …