Rize

Yeah... so... I bet he can't barn-dance like I can.

By Simone Ubaldi

Black people are better than white people. You can see it when they dance: this whole-body salute to sex and the sky. They are stronger, faster and they have better rhythm. When they dance, black kids are king - which is a good thing, because they spend the rest of their lives getting fucked over by the white world. Famed pop photographer David LaChappelle’s arresting document of the new ghetto dance style is about how these poor black kids move, and how they move as a means to understand how they survive.

Tommy the Clown plays children’s parties in South Central L.A., with full face of makeup and a cheap microphone rig. He’s become famous in those parts because a Tommy the Clown appearance means a full-blown block party, complete with a team of young dancers Tommy has trained as “Clowners”, who intersperse magic tricks and songs with a vicious blend of Jamaican dancehall, African tribal rhythms and straight-up, MTV-style bootie-shakin. Elsewhere in the neighbourhood, former students of the Clown School have formed breakaway crews, some claiming to have revolutionised the Clowning style. Under street lights, on abandoned basketball courts, these kids “krump”, turning Tommy’s already frantic dance style into a violently theatrical and extraordinarily beautiful swarm of body parts. Krumpers or Clowners, they agree that dancing has kept them out of gangs and off drugs - but that’s all they agree on. Every one of these kids is competitive, from four-year-old Lil' Mama to teenage father figure Tight Eyez, and sooner or later, there’s gonna be a showdown.

Rize drinks in the frenetic, balletic, savage and celebratory movement of these kids in endless and endlessly gripping footage, but their machine-gun grace is more than cool or clever. As they each reveal the horrors of their personal histories, with crack-addict mothers, suicidal fathers and family-inflicted gunshot wounds at the tip of the iceberg, their movements take on all the merits and meaning of politicised self-expression. They dance to express joy, hopelessness, spirituality and rage, having no other means at their disposal. As is brazenly implied by some parallel editing, they dance to repossess their African roots. LaChappelle sets the scene with footage from the 1965 Watts Riots, and closes his film with That Quote from Martin Luther King, but however dogmatic, his convictions ring true: when your life is constantly under threat and your people are oppressed, dancing is never just dancing. If it was, it probably wouldn’t be so incredible to watch.