Big Picture: Rize (2005)
- Presented By: Tampa Theatre
- Dates: April 30, 2025
- Time: 8:00 PM
- 711 N Franklin St, Tampa, FL 33602
- Price: $7-$10
Tampa Theatre
For the next subject of our new monthly Big Picture series, Tampa Theatre offers Dancing, Through Life: a selection of films that all center the experience of dance as a method of escape — escape from a difficult life, escape from an adversarial world, even transcendent escape from the mundane into ecstatic beauty.
Big Picture: Rize (2005)
In South Central Los Angeles in the early ‘90s, Thomas Johnson was trying to change his life. He had just spent five years in jail and was looking for a new path. Always outgoing and entertaining, he was asked to perform as a birthday clown at a kid’s party — and from there, he used his Tommy the Clown persona to encourage kids in his community to dance and be expressive instead of joining gangs, doing drugs and getting hurt. He called his optimistic new dance movement “clowning,” and from clowning evolved krumping, a frenetic and highly athletic form of dance that replaces the clown aesthetic with regular street fashion. Rize, directed by photographer and music video director David LaChapelle, documents clowning and krumping through the eyes of the people performing and developing it in real time in the real neighborhoods of Los Angeles — including Lil’ C, who has been a judge and choreographer on the popular reality competition show So You Think You Can Dance.
Tommy the Clown makes an appearance in last year’s music video for Kendrick Lamar’s Not Like Us. You may have heard of it. He’s still out there doing what clowns have done for centuries: dancing, performing, making people smile, and expressing something true that cannot be expressed by any other means.