Long Beach Post By Sarah Bennett
Photos by Sage Gallon courtesy of The Underground.
Every Wednesday night, street dancers from across Los Angeles meet at a gang-neutral strip mall parking lot in North Hollywood for a krump session. One at a time, dancers with nicknames like Lil “C,” Miss Prissy and Krucial flail their arms, contort their bodies aggressively, and make frantic footwork to a thumping beat. In a few minutes, the dancer’s catharsis is over and it is another one’s turn to “work it out.”
This is the essence of krump, a Los Angeles-born street dance that along with several other forms of hip-hop movement are the focus of The Underground, a new dance company that will be performing at Cal State Long Beach on Saturday. Instead of guns and thug life, The Underground’s 10 dancers direct their frustration with street living into so-called “sessions” like the one in North Hollywood—freestyle dance workshops often held in reclaimed public spaces that attract talented dance groups from all over L.A.’s sprawl.
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