Cellule: What is this krump dance going to battle for?
What seems to be a fight against oppression retreats somewhere murkily internal.
Project Arts Centre - Space Upstairs, Dublin Dance Festival
★★☆☆☆
When first reported in Los Angeles in the early 2000s, krumping – a high-energy street dance – was viewed as a kind of means to diffuse an already desperate situation. Those early innovators, hailing from the city’s neglected neighbourhoods, speculated if they weren’t dancers, they’d likely be gangsters.
That’s not to say the dance isn’t aggressive. This improvisational hurricane of chest-pops, stomps and haymaker arm swings is as attitudinal as it is choreographic. In that fin-de-siècle vision of a Los Angeles intimated by racist police and violent gangs, such gestures seem a way for citizens to take up space. To claim a piece of the city for themselves.
French choreographer Nach learned krumping from street dancers performing outside the Opéra de Lyon. Her interpretation Cellule (a biological term for the independent subunit of an organism) premiered in 2017 but stands to gain in resonance. If krumping articulated feelings about the subjugation of black bodies that were resonant after the 1992 Los Angeles riots, the police murder of George Floyd in 2020 unleashed that pain anew.