Éloge du puissant royaume

“Éloge du puissant royaume” is the french version of the English acronym Krump – Kingdom Radly Uplifted Mighty Praise. This urban phenomenon was born in Los Angeles in the 1990s in a context of gang warfare and racial riots.

I met these Krump dancers because I have probably been looking for them forever. Their names are Jigsaw, Kellias, Crow … code names from their reinvented identities. Krump is a profound movement, but not yet a commodity. Somehow the world brought it into being where it was not expected, an inside dance, authentically spiritual, made to drive the monsters out of hiding, to speak the unarticulated words caught in the throats of those who can no longer cry out.
It is the only dance which is truly worthy.
Before being part of a trend, it is an invented rite, a crazed form of praise, the brutal contorsions of someone refusing a contemporary straitjacket.
Its dancers are crying out, ‘What is happening to the force which is leading us? What does this failed world mean? What lives in our deepest darkest places?’
But this dance is also a chance, because it is a way to share the violence which drives us, a way to understand it by freeing ourselves from its discourse.
It is a dance for the beginning or the end of time, evoking the essence of what makes a man today, a secret hiding and living deep inside the darkness of a man’s own night.”

Source : Heddy Maalem, May 2012

More information : http://www.heddymaalem.com/