A spotlight focuses on a young man in the center of the stage who is frozen in a statue-like pose. As a hip-hop track begins, the young man suddenly becomes animated, telling the story of a gang fight through his motions. His jerky movements emulate a style of dancing called krumping, which originated in the streets of South Central Los Angeles.
This idea of combining krump dancing with storytelling is the brainchild of UCLA alumnus Rickerby Hinds, who received his master’s degree from the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television in 1996. His performance group Buck World One is made up of San Bernardino inner-city youth who tell stories of their struggles through performance.
“People think that hip-hop and rap are the end of Western civilization,” Hinds said. “We use it as a means of beginning a dialogue.”
The subject matter hits close to home for Hinds, who grew up in South Central across the street from a strip club. Immigrating to the United States from Honduras at the age of 12, Hinds said he and his three siblings were raised by their single mother after their father, a merchant marine, drowned at sea.
“I had no arrests, no problems with the law,” Hinds said. “I wanted to be the example for my siblings and never wanted to let my mother down. I didn’t want to have to wonder if my influence had a negative impact on them.”
Hinds’ mother never made more than $23,000 a year, yet she valued education enough to put Hinds and his siblings through private high school at Lynwood Academy in Los Angeles. Upon graduation in 1983, he decided to attend college.
“I had no clear course or direction,” Hinds said. “I was going to get my degree and finish up. It was a combination of persistence, understanding and knowing that I was the first of my family to go to college.”
Hinds transferred from a local community college to UC Riverside in 1986 and, as an artistic outlet, he started writing plays.
“I wanted to write something, and I wanted to say something in a certain way,” Hinds said. “That’s when I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.”
One of his plays, “Our Little Secret,” caught the attention of Professor Carlos Martin, who encouraged Hinds to rewrite the play and submit it to a local festival, where it sparked the interest of Edit Villarreal, associate dean of academic affairs at the School of Theater, Film and Television.
Hinds expressed his interest and had an official interview to enter the master’s program, but he was nowhere near graduating from UC Riverside. He still needed to complete his senior thesis and had defaulted on his student loan, forcing him to take every other quarter off to work and earn money. Ten years after entering college, Hinds graduated from Riverside with an independently designed major emphasizing race relations.
Hinds was then able to take up Villarreal’s offer and enter the graduate playwriting program. Though he had a son at the time and his wife was pursuing her doctorate in English at UCLA, Hinds finished the master’s program in two years. He said he sometimes had to hand his son off to his wife between classes.
“It was the best schooling I have ever done in my life,” Hinds said. “Being a writer is a process. “˜Examine with the critical eye,’ what I teach my students right now, I discovered at UCLA.”
After graduation, Hinds returned to UC Riverside as a playwriting professor and dedicated much of his time to teaching inner-city youth the value of education.
Part of his work included starting Buck World One with the youth from the Central City Lutheran Mission in San Bernardino. It began when a friend asked Hinds to attend a meeting at the church held by young men who, instead of fighting, took out their aggression by battling via krump dancing or as they called it, “buck” (which stands for “Believers United in Christ’s Kingdom”) dancing.
“I checked out the sessions and was blown away by the creativity,” Hinds said. “I realized they were doing a lot of storytelling with their bodies, some comical, some telling stories of oppression, some stories about letting emotions out.”
After two months, Hinds announced to the attendees of the krump battles that he was creating a theater performance piece. Sixty people were whittled down to 10 dancers and spoken-word poets, all passionate about the project.
Working closely with Black Voice, an organization that encourages young black men to attend college, Hinds takes the Buck World One performers on tours to different colleges to show them the positive effects of education.
“He’s been a big inspiration on our lives outside of (Buck World One),” said 18-year-old Timothy Dupree, a performer with a solo spoken performance about being raised without a father.
“Before Rickerby, I wasn’t thinking about college. Now I go to community college and am trying to get my AA and transfer to Cal State San Bernardino.”
In his effort to stress the importance of education, Hinds even converted his basement into a dormitory for college-bound boys who have problems at home that prevent them from concentrating on academics.
“I didn’t set out to create performers or dancers; I wanted to create young people who became successful in life,” Hinds said. “If they never danced again, it would be inconsequential. I want to teach them that they have something to offer.”