Leaving Legacies

Krump is the mesmerizing, Los Angeles-born street dance epitomized by highly energetic, exaggerated, and explosive movements. Through the 2005 documentary Rize, it became a pop culture phenomenon, with krump dancers touring with stars like Madonna. Simultaneously, a durable krump underground developed, as communities across the country embraced the dance’s unique capacity to embody healing through movement. With the visionary leadership of Trevor Hunter and Tyrell Powe’s Leaving Legacies project, the Jackson, Mississippi, krump scene is truly rising: this fall, the city will host Immortal Buck, which Hunter describes as “an Olympics of krump.”

At first glance, krump can seem intimidating, even aggressive. Some dances are staged as battles. But it has the opposite effect. “Krump is absolutely life-saving,” explains Hunter—it’s individual and communal therapy through expressive movement. Krump, which stands for “Kingdom Radically Uplifted Mighty Praise,” emerged from poor and working-class African American neighborhoods in Los Angeles in 2002. In the 1990s, Thomas “Tommy the Clown” Johnson had developed a hip hop style of “clown dancing” as part of his rainbow-wigged work for birthday parties in Compton and South Central. Young people flocked to learn from him. Krump was born as those dancers searched beneath the happy facade of clowning to process the challenges and traumas of life in their neighborhoods. Krump’s basic movements—the “chest pop” somewhere between a heartbeat and a threat, the rapid arm movements on the verge of a punch—are fleshed out through each dancer’s creativity and the story they want to tell.

Inspired to learn krumping by Rize as a teenager, Trevor Hunter—already skilled at “popping,” one of the original hip hop dance styles—left his hometown of Jackson in search of opportunities to dance. He landed in Houston, where he taught choreography with So Real Crew, winners of America’s Best Dance Crew. In 2018, Hunter was back in Jackson, “throwing sessions” with a new group that recruited a promising dancer named Tyrell Powe. For Powe—whose street dance name “Reflex Arc” reflects both his medical studies and his conviction that dance is a part of his reflexes—teaching krump was a natural extension of the healing and performing sides of his personality. Hunter’s dance names also speak to krump’s myriad meanings. Mr. SoulRhythm is the groove, while M.U.R.D.A. (Moving Under Redeemer’s Divine Authority) is something more serious: “In the spiritual sense, for me, I’m killing my insecurities,” he says, “I have to murder that so I can produce something beautiful.”

In 2019, Hunter and Powe began to organize the sessions and classes that became Leaving Legacies. Today, they teach their life-affirming “Homicide Bootcamp” at the nonprofit, community-based Briarwood Arts Center. At the National Folk Festival, they will be featured in staged battles and interactive performances with a DJ-backed group of dancers who began as their students and are now helping expand Leaving Legacies’ healing mission across Jackson.