First-time director explores krumping

LOS ANGELES — It's a short drive from the buttery glow of the Chateau Marmont hotel above the Sunset Strip, where fashion photographer David LaChapelle sips his pale-green tea, to the True Workers of the Holy Trinity House of Prayer down in South Central, where the light is harsh, and so is life — and where two young men, dancers named Dragon and Tight Eyez, hunker down beneath a mural depicting a black Christ.

"Might as well be another country," says LaChapelle, talking about the South Central 'hood just a dozen miles down the road, where he filmed his first movie. "It's so segregated. I mean, nobody from here goes there. Why would they? Or, you know, that's what people here would say."

LaChapelle — gay, white, rich, flamboyant, obsessed, product of the best art schools — made the trip from the Strip down to South Central. He spent $500,000 of his own money, he says, and almost three years of weekends and days off from his work as a high-end fashion photographer and music video director (for Jennifer Lopez, Elton John and Britney Spears) to make the hybrid documentary-musical, "Rize," which opens tomorrow.

LaChapelle says nobody — not even his agent — understood until they saw the film. "They wanted me to put movie stars in it," he says.

The critics are happy he did not. The film has gotten raves. It is about pure joy and raw rage, about a hip-hop dance style sired by a former drug dealer named Tommy the Clown, and transformed into "krumping," which is kind of like break dancing on fast-forward.

"The krump? You know when you see it," says Tight Eyez, whose real name is Ceasare Willis, one of the "Rize" subjects and an established master of the dance form, now 20, with a bullet hole through his elbow from when he was shot by his grandfather while he was protecting his mother in a house brawl.

A few hours before talking with LaChapelle, the interview with Tight Eyez and Dragon took place at a storefront church on a block of inner-city blight.

Krumpitude? "It's the power of the warrior unleashed," Tight Eyez says. The movements — the thrusts and pops — are super-fast and in-your-face, and the dancers sometimes seem lost in an ecstatic, almost trancelike state, as if "a depth charge is exploding inside of them," LaChapelle says, like "they have something inside them they need to exorcise."

In some scenes, the krump resembles wrestling, with dancers of both sexes facing off in mock combat in the ring, or in more formal "Battle Zones," taunting each other, grabbing and pulling their shirts. "It's like two Siamese fighting fish," says Tight Eyez. "You put them in the same tank and they'll go after it."

Dragon and Tight Eyez are muscled, and in the film their six-pack abs are oiled and on display, adored by LaChapelle's close camera work.

The buzz has been building for this film ever since LaChapelle screened it at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, where it commanded standing ovations.

The krump, they insist, is not the hustle. "It's not a craze. It's deeper, more beautiful, and darker and more aggressive, with more meaning," the director says.

That's what the dancers keep saying, too. "It's not some commercial hip-hop, bling-bling, booty thing," explains Dragon, whose real name is Jason Green, 23, now studying to be a minister. "It's something inside you that came out of our world, out of our neighborhood."

In fact, Dragon and his friends disparage the popular rap videos that feature faux gangbangers and pretenders draped in gold jewelry, drinking Cristal. "That's about self-glorification," Dragon says. "All that doesn't mean crap. Because they're going to hell."

Really, sitting in the humble storefront church, sometimes Dragon and Tight Eyez sound like Christian conservatives, warning that the nation has strayed from God, and that the youth — and everybody else just chasing the dollar — are losing their souls in a material, oversexed culture running amok. "Krump led us to Jesus and got us saved," says Tight Eyez.

The movie details the rise of krump in South Central, coming up under the pop-culture radar in back yards and parties.

The phenomenon started with Tommy the Clown, Thomas Johnson, a reformed crack dealer who, upon release from jail in 1992, was asked by a friend to dress up as a clown and perform at a kid's birthday party, to make a few hundred bucks, legit. Over time, Johnson — dolled up like a ghetto-fabulous Bozo — began to entertain not just with balloons and tricks but with dancing, taking standard hip-hop moves and making them more outrageous and antic.

Johnson attracted a retinue of young performers who painted their faces and wore crazy florid T-shirts. They came to dance at the birthday parties, attend his Tommy the Clown hip-hop dance academy and later his Battle Zone contests at the Great Western Forum. At first, it was known as "clown dancing," and dozens of crews and cliques competed at the Battle Zones and birthday-party gigs.

But the young dancers eventually found the Tommy the Clown style too tame. "We were vicious dancers," Dragon says. "Too rough and aggressive for the birthday parties."

The film portrays krumping as an antidote to gangbanging and crime, an outlet for athletes who don't play basketball or football, and a physical catharsis to free the pain of being raised in households where the kids drag their mamas out of crack houses, and fathers are nowhere to be seen.

What will happen to the krump scene? There are already crews of Latinos, Asians and white kids, and it has spread to Long Beach, Las Vegas and now up in Oakland, where the dance is called "hyphy." And the young dancers themselves?

"I don't know what's going to happen to them," LaChapelle says. "I do know this: Will success ruin them? No. But I know failure will."