“It’s Like Being Alive:” Unknowable Krump Dance and Black Fugitivity as a Utopian Practice

Abstract

After six years of ethnographic research with a group of Black male Krump dancers from the larger L.A. area I have come to see and understand their dance practice in counterintuitive ways – as fugitive and utopian. Fully acknowledging their subject position as always already “proximate to death,” (Sharpe 2016, 17) and as exposed to an overwhelmingly antiblack climate, in the dystopic here and now, the dancers’ everyday experiences are shaped by a notion of their lives as beyond precarious. Consequently, when they dance, the narratives they embody on the dancefloor must take them elsewhere, must be fantastical. Imagining cyborgs, superheroes, superhero vigilantes, and villains, they dance to reenvision history, to address and navigate trauma, and to save themselves in a fugitive and utopian endeavor. The dancers’ emphasis on the necessity of an ever-perpetuating practice, and their concepts of the glitch, the portal, and time as circular importantly suggest not only a disidentification from this world but it also signals to anti-capitalist gestures that reaffirm both their alienation in this world and their desire to make an otherwise world elsewhere. Ultimately, in considering my interlocutors’ Krump dance as an interior and quiet practice, I suggest a new and different reading of an important cultural form that until today has been largely misunderstood and misrecognized as deceivingly knowable.