Text Sushi by Alf Rehn

For anyone who has seen me, or generally for anyone who knows I’m a) Scando, b) a management professor, it should come as no surprise that I’m no dancer. Laying it on y’all straight, I can’t dance. At all. This, however, does not mean that I don’t take an interest in it. For instance, I’ve taken a shine to krumping and hyphy as of late. Yes, I know I’m late to the game, and everyone’s supposed to have seen Rize already, but it is not necessarily the movement in and of itself that interests me. Rather, it is the way in which it is judged and appreciated. While I can see the differences between classic clown-dancing and krump, I have difficulty evaluating different krump styles. Yet it is obvious that aficionados see lots of differences, discerning between subtle differences and reading lots into these. It seems that true fans can even tell from what part of a city someone comes from by evaluating their krump. This, the plasticity of judgment, the way in which we humans can develop taxonomic and evaluative skills about basically any- and everything is a source of unending fascination for me.