It’s all about you. Between classes, friends, and the frantic pace of college life, it’s easy to forget about yourself. Meet three students whose hobbies and passions keep them on track.
Before his senior year at Elkhart Memorial High School, Tyrece Franklin traded his spot on the varsity basketball team for one on the school’s mostly-female dance team. Although his entry into the competitive dance world was recent, his passion for dance began three years earlier.
Let the ten-hour practices ensue.
It wasn’t until he saw David LaChappelle’s 2005 street dance documentary, “Rize,” the summer before his freshman year of high school that he discovered a passion for krumping that led him to a performance on BET’s “106 & Park” and a major in contemporary dance at IU.
“Hip-hop is fun and all, but it feels too external for me,” says Franklin, now a sophomore. “I feel everything in my soul when I krump, and still have yet to find a better feeling.”
Tight Eyez, a krumper featured in the documentary, had moves that inspired Franklin unlike anything else he had ever seen before.
“My initial reaction was ‘Oh my God! I want to be able to move like that man! This is probably the tightest dance I’ve ever seen!’” says Franklin. “He drives me every day to do what I do just so I can meet him and shake his hand.”
From there he says he watched hundreds of Tight Eyez’s videos on YouTube and taught himself the basics of krumping.
“I would get home from basketball practice, eat dinner, and then dance from 8 til 6 in the morning,” says Franklin.
Krumping is actually an acronym that stands for Kingdom Radically Uplifted Mighty Praise. It’s a spiritual dance that consists of traditional African movements, elements of pop-locking, and self-expression in its truest form, says Franklin, which makes it different from a typical hip-hop routine.
“It’s not just dance,” says Franklin. “We all pray before the battles and dance to get the evil out of an area.”
Even though Franklin has yet to meet any other krumpers at IU, he practices alone for one to two hours every day, whether it’s in a studio on campus or his bedroom.
Sometimes he says he dances so hard that once he gets going, he’ll lose sense of time.
“Before I perform I get so nervous, sweaty palms and all that, but once I start dancing I lose my sense of self,” he says. “It’s almost an out of body experience.”
At his high school graduation open house Franklin says he danced for 20 songs straight.
“They said I was preaching with my movements and my words, literally speaking scripture. I don’t really remember though I was dancing so hard, after I was done I fainted,” says Franklin. “Everyone there said it was God speaking through me. They saw a glow about me while I was dancing.”
Franklin is humble about his talents.
Along with performing on BET this past summer with a group out of Evansville called “Detri-Mental,” he has opened for a performance of “America’s Best Dance Crew” season one finalist Break Sk8, but he said what he likes best is dancing with his friends and family at home in Elkhart.
“It’ll be just us in the living room, 25 or 30 people, releasing and having fun,” says Franklin.
Franklin’s strong relationship with dance can be applied to any kind of self-expression. He says his main message is to do what you love.
“A lot of people take dance too seriously, don’t make it feel like a job,” says Franklin. “That’s when your best ideas flow.”
