WHAT IS AFROBUCK // NAS MAGNIFICENT X SMACK. Published by NasMagnificent, 2021

In his own words: “I feel like Afro Buck is us being true to ourselves. Afro Buck is like when the western people came they gave us English, but now we have pidgin English.”

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He admits that there are limitations for him and other West African dancers who are embracing and expressing themselves through just Krump, because they are detached from and don’t relate directly to the realities that inspired Tight Eyez and the other originators of Krump. They are able to overcome these limitations through the expressive and dramatic performativity that comes to them naturally as Nigerian dancers. And so they began to take inspiration from their community and created movements based on the different emotions they saw being expressed around them in the streets and market places. Smack speaks about taking inspiration to create movements from observing an old woman whose son returned from the city with expensive gifts for her and he wanted to capture the expressiveness of her joy through Krump. “Imagine an old woman, imagine her expression when her son who left the city years ago to go and hustle, he now returns with gifts for her... imagine the cacophonic joy that is beyond what the human eye can see, cos only she can understand where that is coming from. Imagine how she will dance? So we decided to pick expressions like this and put them in the Krump which had already been made by Tight Eyez.”

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Smack sees Krump as a tool and decided to look within himself to find what roots he could express using that tool. For him Krump is bigger than him, it is bigger than Afro Buck, and bigger than even Tight Eyez himself. Afro Buck is about them creating an identity in the Krump space and should not be seen as a pollution of Krump or a change of its narrative because at the heart of Krump he sees the dance movement as having roots in traditional West African dances. Smack mentions Krump movements are very similar to traditional Nigerian Masquerade dances: “If you check the similarities of Krump, it is no different from our own indigenous dance steps... so it is just us tracing back to where we are from... unknowingly. I know this argument is going to come up where people will say how come Krump is said to be a western thing when all the movements and gestures and postures looks like a Masquerade dancing... you need to see the Masquerade dancing. They dance with high intensity, just like how rock is a heavy genre of music, Krump is heavy, Krump is radical, Krump is emotional, just like where we come from... that is our culture, all of this is us tracing back to our fathers and grandfathers.”

He likens the Krump spaces in Nigeria where he and his friends and colleagues meet up to dance to the indigenous community squares that his ancestors met up in to tell stories.

IGBANMAWN NDI IGBO ....MY CULTURE.. MY PRIDE .. Published by IKORONDIGBO TV, 2017

The Body of the Dancer and the Performance as a Living Archive.

In JC Niala’s paper she speaks to the fact that the violence that inspired the creation of Krump as a dance form is not just personal to that community but is common across different inner cities across the globe. As such, people all over the world who exist in similar realities are able to draw inspiration from Krump because of their relation to similar stories archived in their dance practice. This phenomenon is not just particular to Krumping, I documented how drill became asakaa in Ghana, in my previous essay The Woo Dance vs Kete: Tradition Recycled or Coincidence?  So it was no surprise for me to discover Twitches relation to Krumping.

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Unlike the creators of Krump, Twitches doesn’t have any personal or communal relationship to the dance moves, yet his body and his mind are able to pick up on some of the stories archived in the dance form. Whenever he dances it - even when he is across the globe - once he opens himself up to the dance he starts to feel freedom. The “relief” of which he speaks about and what he finds in the dance is the very thing he saw in the high school on that fateful day at 1am. It is common for artists to enter a meditative state mid performance and the cathartic nature of this is very liberating. As a performer, I am familiar with this phenomenon. Though I’m not a dancer, there are certain moments mid performance, mid rehearsal or even mid production where I could be writing a poem, rapping, or creating a theatrical piece, that once I let myself go into the flow, everything starts to feel euphoric. It’s just like how Twitches describes it, the past, present and future seem to become one.

As an African, I have come to understand that this spiritual experience has roots linking it to indigenous griot traditions. On this side of the world, the histories and memories of communities were archived as performances. To those of us who grew up connected to these traditions and seeing them evolve over time, we tend to overlook the fact that though we are actively practicing our artforms outside of a traditional spiritual context, the spirit of tradition is still present in our performances. When we look deep in ourselves we see glimpses of that, it is why people like Twitches can draw and feel connections between two different traditions that are so similar yet were born out of two completely different times.

Smack is able to draw linkages of what he’s seen and learned to what is felt and expressed in his community. This is possible for him because he sees similarities between Krump and indigenous Nigerian dances. It is out of this paradigm that Afro Buck grows and it can be seen as an extension of the ever-evolving archive that the performance and the body of Afrikan performers is.

As a student of the performing arts, one lesson I became familiar with quickly was that African performance was deliberately used by our ancestors as a knowledge repository. Among my people - the Ewes of southern Ghana - there is a dance performed every year at the Hogbetsotso festival called Misago. It is done to remind us of how our ancestors escaped the tyrant king Agorkorli of Notsie many years ago. The mythology says that under the guidance of the great Sage Torgbui Tsali our ancestors broke through the walls of Notsie and walked backwards to freedom. It is that backward walk to freedom that was archived as the Misago dance.

Other instances like this are are played out across the diaspora including how slaves in Brazil hid their martial arts in the capoeira dance as a means to pass on tradition without getting killed by imperialists.

Performance and Performativity

To further understand what the connection between Krump and west African traditional dances was, I reached out to Terry Bright Ofosu, a lecturer at the Department of Dance studies at the University of Ghana. Terry was a hip-hop dancer in Ghana in the late 90s and early 2000s before he went into academia where he is noted for doing extensive research work on contemporary dance in Ghana, specifically hip-hop dance. He referred me to a paper titled “Globalization and the Hip-hop cypher” which he co-wrote with Halifu Osumare as part of the recently published The Oxford Handbook of Hip-Hop Dance Studies. The paper explores what it labels as the “global-local problematic” with reference to hip-hop dance. A phenomenon that explores how dance movements originating from Africa evolved into hip-hop dance and how globalisation transplanted this subculture back to Africa and across the globe, thus creating pockets of localised hip-hop dance scenes all evolving differently. The paper closely follows the hip-hop dance scene in Hawaii and Ghana in the late 90s and early 2000s respectively.

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It links the early hip-hop dance scene in Ghana to the children of the then upper-class citizens who first had direct access and consumed American media - either through television, VCR or later via CD rentals. It wasn’t until they replicated these dances in the club that they were copied by people from other classes of society who did not have direct access to the same American media. This led to hip-hop dances like b-boying becoming popular on the streets of Accra and dance battles and ciphers became frequent too.

It goes on to describe the dance cipher as a place of higher consciousness in which the continuation of tradition is developed; that’s to say that in a cypher a very creative dancer is able to determine the direction the dance style will go. It is through this process where we see the fusion of traditional dance and hip-hop dance here in Ghana.

In a typical Ghanaian hip-hop cypher the dance usually starts with learned moves, moves that the dancers have picked up either primarily or secondarily from American media. As the cypher progresses and the dancers exhaust their borrowed stories and moves, the need to impress a local audience with new creativity leads them into the realm of translating familiar movements from traditional dances into the hip-hop cypher.

It is this phenomenon that Ofosu and Osumare refer to as Performance and Performativity. How hip-hop dance in Ghana is a merging of the replication of an observed performance, and the indigenisation that goes into the process of executing that said performance with localised references. This makes it relatable to a Ghanaian audience who are detached from the realities that inspired the original dance style and would be needed to fully appreciate the said performance. That is why dancers like Twitches and Smack - who are detached from the realities that inspired Krump - are still able to hop on it, relate and make it their own.

It’s through the existence of Afro Buck that we get to see how Krump can evolve into something different under a context of localised performativity in Nigeria and then how that is then exported globally.

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This theory of performance and performativity isn’t just peculiar to dance but music too, and it is because of this that subgenres of hip-hop like hiplife developed. This is where we were seeing hip-hop being fused with traditional music and languages which went on to inspire the contemporary dance scene in Ghana.

Ofosu and Osumare speak on how hip-hop dance itself already has its social identities embedded and codified in its performance before it is globally exported. With the case of Krumping we see it play out through the evolution of Clowning into Krumping, and the new realities we see captured in the film Rize. The dance form is received in West Africa and through the development of its performativity and performance an indigenisation process occurs and it develops into Afro Buck. The hip-hop dancer now becomes a living, evolving archive that carries the documentation of the evolution of the dance form along with pieces of the different stories that inspired the origins and evolution of the form. The hip-hop dancer and the dance are not just a collective archive of the history of the dance but are key to its future. The internet can transport Afro Buck either back to the USA or anywhere in the world and evolve into something entirely new. Ofosu and Osumare attribute this to the room for improvisation offered by the presence of freestyle in hip-hop dance. Improvisation which they themselves describe as a trait of African dance. A point that was also made by Smack in my interview with him.