Krumping

Krump is a type of dance culture that evolved through African-American street dancing popularized in the United States during the early 2000s, characterized by free, expressive, exaggerated, and highly energetic movement. The people who originated krumping saw the dance as a means for them to escape gang life.

The root word krump came from the lyrics of a 1990 song and is sometimes explained as a backronym for Kingdom Radically Uplifted Mighty Praise, which presents krumping as a faith-based art form. Krumping was created by dancers: Ceasare "Tight Eyez" Willis, Marquisa "Miss Prissy" Gardner, Christopher "Lil' C" Toler and Jo'Artis "Big Mijo" Ratti in South Central, Los Angeles, during the early 2000s. Although krumping was not directly created by Tommy, it was inspired by his “clowning”. Originally, Willis and Ratti were clown dancers for Tommy, but as their dancing was considered too "rugged" and "raw" for clowning, they left and developed krumping. Tommy eventually opened a clown-dancing academy and started the Battle Zone competition at the Great Western Forum where krump crews and clown crews could come together and battle each other in front of an audience of their peers.

There are five basic moves in krumping: stomps, jabs, chest pops, Buck hop, and arm swings. Krumping is rarely choreographed; it is almost entirely freestyle to a song (improvisational) and is danced most frequently in battles or sessions rather than on a stage. Krump is stylistically different from other hip-hop dance styles such as breaking and turfing. Krumping is very aggressive and is danced upright to upbeat and fast-paced music, but it does not promote aggression or fighting – moves are meant to take up space and challenge other dancers to feed off and return the energy, whereas breaking is more acrobatic and is danced on the floor to break beats. The Oakland dance style turfing is a fusion of popping and miming that incorporates storytelling and illusion. Krump is less precise, and more freestyle, than turfing. Thematically, all these dance styles align under the term street dance as they all share common attributes of their street origins, their freestyle nature and the use of battling.