Dancing Daze

Working up a sweat: Lil C (left) and Tight Eyez (right) in the film Rize. Photo David LaChapelle. Courtesy Lions Gate Productions.

In Rize, a new documentary by surrealist fashion photographer and music video director David LaChapelle, the human body pops, locks, twists and shudders in staccato bursts. The film studies two related but distinct dance styles: “clowning” came first, “krumping” is its evolution. Both began in South Central Los Angeles, where gang violence is a waking nightmare. Clowns and krumpers dance as if lit by an inner fire. They move with frenetic abandon, torsos quaking, limbs chopping the air in spastic rhythms. The sum is an ebullient, martial expression of pride, creativity and community.

Rize starts with a title card: “The footage in this film has not been sped up in any way.” A montage unfolds, much of it shown in slow motion. L.A. burns in the 1965 Watts riots. A gospel singer yowls (“Seek ye the Lord...”) as the screen flickers forward to 1992. South Central re-ignites in the wake of the Rodney King trials. “This is where we grew up,” a voice-over intones. “We were all kids back when this happened, but we managed to grow from these ashes. And this is where we still live.” It’s now 2002. Four black women dance near the hood of a car, mimicking the LAPD’s attack on King; three pretend to pummel the fourth with imaginary batons. The gospel fades. A fierce, ragged beat succeeds it. “This is not a trend,” a young man named Dragon insists, his face tagged with grease-paint. “Let me repeat, this is not a trend.” Krumpers cut loose at a concrete playground, camera tracking at full, hard-to-believe speed.

LaChapelle, in press for Rize, has said he discovered L.A.’s clown culture three years ago, while directing Christina Aguilera’s Dirrty video. He went backstage between takes and found several extras krumping; thrilled, he ventured into South Central to see more. (LaChapelle lives in Hollywood, but had never visited L.A.’s most notorious neighbourhood.) He knew he had a movie the moment he met Thomas Johnson, a.k.a. Tommy the Clown, the former crack dealer who invented clown dancing.

Sad clown: Tommy the Clown. Photo David LaChapelle. Courtesy Lions Gate Productions.

In 1992, Tommy was new to God, fresh out of jail and eager for legitimate work. Someone called to ask if he would dress as a clown for a children’s birthday party. The job agreed with him — Tommy has the disposition of a Care Bear — and he soon became a local celebrity. He blasted hip hop as part of his show, which includes old-time favourites like twisted-balloon animals, and busted a few dance moves. Tommy founded a clown academy, taking in child protegés to keep them from running with gangs. His clown group — the academy dancers who began accompanying Tommy to parties — inspired dozens of imitators. (Los Angeles is now said to host 80 clown groups and about 1,000 dancers. The scene is mostly black, but includes Asian, white and Latino groups. All but a few of Rize’s subjects are black.)

Tommy’s dancing didn’t become a sensation until he combined his existing repertoire — generic moves anyone might make at a club, plus hints of voguing and light acrobatics — with the “stripper dance,” which is exactly what it sounds like. Imagine a clown built like a bouncer dressed in two-tone coveralls, rainbow-coloured Afro wig and full face-paint. Now picture him shaking ass like his rent depended on it. That’s Tommy. That’s clowning.

LaChapelle worked with a tiny crew on Rize, never more than five people. While his photo projects are monuments to micromanagement — LaChapelle art directs his fashion shoots to obsessive detail — he purposefully avoided imposing himself on Rize. Instead his subjects do all the work, yielding intimate particulars of life in South Central. Much of the movie’s exposition comes through close-up shots of black teenagers painting themselves with white face paint. “I can make myself a man to where people know who I am and give me my respect for doing something positive, and not going negative,” says one, a strong-looking clown named Swoop. “If I wasn’t doing this clown thing, I honestly think I probably would have been a very, very, very bad person.”

“We’re right here in the lions’ den, the pit of snakes. You have all the gangs on one side, and then you have the clowns on the other side,” says the mother of Larry the Clown, Tommy’s 18-year-old understudy. “Larry is over here with the clowns. I thank God for that. I’m so glad they came out with this clown thing, because there’s no telling where the kids would really be or what would they be doing. What else is there to do?”

Take him on and you'll get served: Tight Eyez. Photo David LaChapelle. Courtesy Lions Gate Productions.

In some corners of clown culture, Tommy’s act came to be considered corny. This discontent nurtured a new, brutal style of dancing. Krumping is raw and confrontational; its dancers trade turns in the centre of a circle, routines punctuated by boastful shakes and attack runs. There is never violence, though krumpers often shove each other by way of trading turns in the limelight. “It’s like hygiene, either you smell good or you don’t. Either you’re krump or you’re not,” says Tight Eyez, a 20-year-old krump master who is probably Rize’s best dancer. “This is not the black sheep, but it’s the wild version [of clowning],” another star krumper, Lil C, tells LaChapelle’s camera. “It’s like you’ve got organized [basketball] and you’ve got street ball. Krumping is the street ball.” Both camps are equally welcoming to women. Females dance as equals; the culture has no “ho” archetype.

Krumpers look different from clowns. They typically dress in oversized jeans and unbranded white T-shirts — a neutral option in a neighbourhood where the wrong colour can invite gunplay — with only a few slashes of face paint. Krumpers and clowns compete against each other at showdowns all over South Central. Some showdowns have trophies, others award cash prizes. Mostly the competition is about what used to be called juice — street pride.

Rize builds to a massive annual showdown created by Tommy. LaChapelle gets jaw-dropping footage of the event, called Battle Zone V. It’s held in the Great Western Forum, former home of the L.A. Lakers, seating capacity 18,000. The event pits Tommy’s top students against Tight Eyez and other ace krumpers. Each side’s dancers pair off against their doppelgängers, then make posturing dance runs, aiming to inflict shame through superior movement. Tommy introduces each match-up to the crowd, and watches from a chair near centre stage. Audience response decides the winners.

Gettin' down like James Brown: Krumper Lil C. Photo David LaChapelle. Courtesy Lions Gate Productions.

From go, Battle Zone feels like the end of 8 Mile, tension amped to 11 as Eminem’s Rabbit explodes through his microphone. LaChapelle heightens the drama by superimposing a running score at the bottom of his frame. The showdown begins with a clash of the queen bees, pitting the clowns’ La Niña against the krumpers’ Miss Prissy. Prissy, standing, kicks up a leg, grabs her ankle, and falls into the splits. Larry the Clown dances shirtless, with a tattoo of Tommy’s face and wig greasepainted onto his back; he crawls like a dog and pretends to pee on his opponent’s leg. Tight Eyez, dressed (and built) like 50 Cent, begins his routine offstage, chair held high over his head. He slams it onstage and stomps up the stairs. His dance is a mock striptease; he seems to hate the clothes he throws to the floor. Even Tommy comes bounding out of his seat.

LaChapelle spent two and a half years making Rize. The movie is not without mistakes: one scene suggests that krumping is ingrained in black DNA, cutting between footage of a South Central krump session and a tribal dance in Africa. (LaChapelle has since repeated this thick-headed thinking in interviews. “It’s in their blood,” he told Salon.) A Martin Luther King, Jr. quote that appears at the end of the movie — “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up” — also feels like reaching too far.

On the whole, though, Rize is a stunning feature-length debut. LaChapelle illuminates the sharp contrast between real, self-made artistry and the manufactured facsimile we so often see coming from Hollywood’s entertainment machine. Tommy the Clown. Larry the Clown. Tight Eyez. Baby Tight Eyez. Dragon, Lil C and Miss Prissy. These are the real American idols.

Rize opens in Toronto and Vancouver on Aug. 5.

Matthew McKinnon writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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