Author Spotlight
Sydney Decker
Photo courtesy of Megan Lindsey
Multimedia by River Hennick
Through a mutual friend’s facebook page, sophomore Megan Lindsey found out about krump — a style of dance characterized as expressive, exaggerated, and highly energetic movement. To learn the dance, she had her parents drive her three hours from her hometown, Fredonia, just to make it to a one-hour practice in Kansas City.
After her and her parents made that drive for a year, they decided to fully move to Kansas City, solely so Lindsey could pursue her career in krumping when she was in seventh grade.
After taking on a completely different style of dance, and building up the confidence to dance against men twice her age, Lindsey has been ranked fifth in Krumping in Kidz of the World, a worldwide category for krump. Lindsey was also able to be in to music videos, Talk Up On It by Krizz Kaliko and Out Da Hood by JL, by being invited to auditions through her coaches. Lindsey has been able to audition for America’s got Talent and a Netflix original movie.
Krump is a style of dance that was created as a way to release emotion and express what you are feeling. The word krump is actually an acronym meaning: Kingdom Radically Uplifted Mighty Praise.
“I just love the style: how it is and how we move,” Lindsey said. “Just being around the atmosphere is pretty fun.”
She now participates in street-style improv battles, where she faces opponents ranging from a girl her age to a grown man. Her battles take place once every month, and since not a lot of krumping takes place in Kansas City, she frequently travels out of state to battle opponents. She frequently travels to California, Arizona, Missouri and many other states to compete in tournaments. Due to krumping being a shared activity worldwide, she has friends in France, Russia and Ukraine that she keeps up with through her Instagram account through comments and DMs.
What attracted her to stay persistent with krump was her present coach, Tyrell Griffin.
“I just loved being around Tyrell, he’s my closest friend,” Lindsey said. “He’s such a great person, it just pulled me in.”
Lindsey, or @princess_konfidentz on Instagram, posts pictures and videos of her practicing, dancing with others and her battling other dancers for her 4,400 followers to see.
“People don’t get to see me often so each time I drop a new clip, people are on it,” Lindsey said. “With Instagram, I like to show what I can do because no one else here does the styles that I do.”
Krumping for Lindsey impacts her everyday life with practicing 12-15 hours every week, traveling out of state and competing every month.
But she is willing to put in the hours of practice and the time traveling takes because she hopes to become a full-time krump dancer and teacher. She made her Instagram account in order to create a portfolio of her talent and hopes to share her skills with anyone interested.
“I’ll also be teaching soon and I think I’ll be pretty good at it.” Lindsey said. “I can teach the style because I’ve been doing it for four years.”
Lindsey plans on teaching kids of all ages and teaching all around the world, but wants to start out locally in Kansas City. Lindsey wants to use her Instagram to show people what she can do, to hopefully show them that they can do it too since it’s not too well known. By teaching, Lindsey will be able to spread her passion to others in a way that she feels they will benefit. In krump, Lindsey finds an outlet to express her emotions in a place that is free from judgment, and she hopes others will feel the same.
“I want to travel and get my name out there to where I’m pretty known, in the style that I mostly do, which is krump,” Lindsey said. “I’m trying to get people to be interested in it and open minded so people can say, ‘Okay, let me try this out, and step out of my comfort zone.'”
Leave a Reply