A rhythmic sampling of So-Cal street life will twist, turn, jump and step its way across an East Valley stage this week.
A troupe of six dancers and four poets called Buck World One will perform a theatrical hip-hop, krump-influenced style of dancing Saturday at the Lyceum Theatre on ASU's Main Campus in Tempe. The production fuses dance, spoken word and interactive video projections to allow each performer to deliver a story about the human condition.
The group of young performers wasdeveloped with the guidance of playwright Rickerby Hinds, who will give a free talk and workshop for the public prior to the dance performance. A native of Honduras who emigrated to Los Angeles at 13, Hinds is a University of California, Riverside, college professor known for pioneering the use of hip-hop as the primary way of communicating in full-length plays.
He was inspired to work with young people from Southern California's inner-cities after he saw them dancing after a church service. Their style - krump - fused athleticism, acrobatics and rhythm into an intense, freestyle dance form. Krumping is a major genre of hip-hop dance that sometimes appears in routines on the reality-TV dancing competition "So You Think You Can Dance."
Hinds' work has been supported or featured by the Ford Foundation, Showtime Television Network, the GeVa Theatre in New York, the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, The New Los Angeles Theater Center and Stanford University.
Buck World One's performance is part of the ASU Herberger Institute School of Theatre and Film Performance in the Borderlands series. Tickets are available now.
