David LaChapelle's Rize, a documentary about a type of freestyle dance called "krumping" that originated on the streets of South Central Los Angeles, is a powerful and visually compelling portrayal of human spirit, a tale of hope in the face of poverty, crime and desperation, with a real-life cast of characters far more compelling than any Hollywood screenwriter could invent.



Krumping as a dance style is difficult to describe, other than to say that the dancers move with incredible speed -- so much so that the film assures us at the beginning that none of the film we are watching has been sped up -- inventiveness and grace. One of the dancers calls it "ghetto ballet", and that's probably as good a description as any.

Rize opens with the tale of Tommy the Clown, a ghetto-raised kid who was on a downhill track when a friend asked him to provide last minute entertainment for her child's birthday party. Tommy found his calling through this happenstance, and now, as the "father of krumping", he keeps kids off the street by training them to be "hip-hop clowns", spreading joy and love instead of drugs. Tommy's clown enterprise spawned a revolution of sorts in South Central LA, and there are now more than 50 clown groups, and rival "krump" groups who consider themselves more raw and "street" than the clown groups. 

There is a fierce but friendly rivalry among the various groups."It's like having bad body odor," one krumper explains with a grin. "Either you got it or you don't. Either you clowin' or you krumping." 

On the "krump" side of the coin is Tight Eyez, who is one of the founders of krumping. Tight Eyez came out to LA from New York and joined forces with Tommy the Clown. Together Tommy the Clown, Tight Eyez, and the rest of the dancers on both sides, have evolved krumping into the form captured in this film. Probably it's changed much just since the movie was made - one of the krumpers claims that the style changes every day, and if you miss dancing for a few days you're "way behind" and everyone makes fun of you for not keeping up.

Kids in South Central used to choose between Crips and Bloods, between being in a gang family, or having no family; now they can choose between gangs and clown or krump groups, and the gangs (mostly) leave the dancers alone. For many of these kids, their dance group is their extended family. They dance together, and they support and help each other.

Rize is, at its heart, an uplifting story. These kids live on the fringe in conditions that much of society closes its eyes to; they are children of families mired deeply in welfare and poverty, drug addiction and crime. They are the kids with mothers on crack and fathers in prison. One of them talks with undue bravado about being shot through the arm by his grandfather, who was shooting at his mother and baby brother in a drunken haze. Another haltingly tells of his father's suicide.

The charismatic Dragon, one of the leaders on the krump side, nonchalantly mentions that his mother was addicted to crack for most of his childhood, and describes how he had to care for his younger siblings. Dragon's mother later tells of her addiction in her own words, and her subsequent conversion to Christianity. She owes much to her eldest son, for keeping her younger children on the right track. She talks about being scared the first time she saw him krumping - "I thought he was on drugs or something, the way he was movin'" - and how she feels about his dance now. "I can krump too," she says proudly in one of the film's lighter moments, "I krump it for Jesus!".
 
In an effort to better channel the strong sense of competition among the rival dance groups, Tommy the Clown formed a dance-off called the BattleZone, some footage of which is shown in the movie. The dance-offs were tense and exciting, and made me wish that I was there in person to see all of it. There is an undertone of violence to the dancing, especially when rivals square off, but as one dancer puts it, "The last thing we're thinking about when we're dancing is fighting. That's not what it's about."

LaChapelle, best known as a celebrity photographer and director of music videos, has no difficulty translating his formidable talent to this film. The film's official website mentions in the production notes that LaChapelle filmed with small crews of no more than five, in the heart of South Central Los Angeles. I found the wording of this statement a little odd, almost the kind of statement one would expect a maker of a documentary film about wild animals to make ("...and we entered the realm of the wildebeest with only a five-man crew, so as not to upset the natural habitat and inspire the beasts' innate aggression to turn against ourselves..."

That aside, Chapelle takes a world that most people outside South Central consider dangerous, and translates it into something familiar; he captures a sense of home and belonging. These are the homes and the streets these kids live in, the world that birthed this dance form that is simultaneously completely original and as ancient as history. There is a particularly compelling sequence where Chapelle juxtaposes scenes of an energetic krumping session with documentary footage of African tribal dancing. The krumping dance moves eerily mirror the tribal dances. African tribesman paint their faces for a ritual dance; clowns and krumpers paint their faces with stark swirls of white and color.

The message, of course, is that what the krumpers have tapped into is something ancient and primal. When they dance they are in an almost religious fervor; indeed, at one point in the film some of the dancers talk about this, and compare krumping to the spiritual state people get into in Pentecostal and other churches. Some of the kids dance regularly at church, tapping into some spirituality that's fascinating to watch.

The cinematography in the film is truly stunning. There is one sequence where LaChapelle films a group of dancers krumping at the LA River Basin. They leap and dance with unbelievable speed and grace against the backdrop of a saturated blue sky, bodies glistening under the sun. It was mesmerizing to watch them move. The single best scene in the movie, though, has dancer Lil C "getting krump" on the beach, silhouetted against the sunset. The sheer energy of his dance, almost as if he's dancing with the ocean, and his joy and sense of triumph gave me goosebumps.

There is gritty truth in this film; it is not all sunshine and light. These kids are growing up in a war zone of violence, in a world where getting out seems insurmountable; the world outside South Central LA, a life different from this, is only a dim reality to many of them. They are surrounded by gangs and gang violence that sometimes touches them, even though they choose not to be involved in that world themselves. One dancer talks of seeing a guy get his head blown off on a street corner, in front of a group of preschoolers just getting out of school. And one of Tommy the Clown's dancers, a 15-year-old girl of much talent and promise, is gunned down on a street corner on her way to buy a soda with a 13-year-old friend, who is also killed.

Rize is dedicated to her memory and, one expects, to the idea that other kids growing up in this violent ghetto will find hope and direction through the rhythm of their dance. One can only hope that the kids at the heart of this movie, many of whom are already working professionally as dancers, don't end up exploited as their dance form grows in popularity.