The basketball court at the St. Mary's City Community Center still smells like floor polish and sweat on Thursday nights. At 7 p.m., someone kills the overhead fluorescents. A single speaker starts playing a chopped-and-screwed track. Then the stomping begins.
Marisol Vega, 16, stands at the edge of the circle, shoes squeaking on the laminate. Six months ago, she had never heard of Krump. Now she's watching a visiting dancer from Baltimore—someone she only knew from Instagram—throw a chest pop so sharp it looks like it hurts. When the music cuts, the room erupts. Not applause. Something louder, more choral. "That's the session," Marisol would explain later. "You're not just watching. You're answering back."
This is how Krump, a street dance born in the underground culture of South Los Angeles, has established itself in one of Maryland's most historically preserved colonial towns. Since February 2023, a small collective of local dancers and transplanted instructors has run weekly workshops that have drawn anywhere from eight participants on quiet nights to nearly forty when LA-based artists visit. What started in a borrowed community center gym has seeded something unexpected: St. Mary's City's first sustained Krump scene, complete with three competing crews, a quarterly battle event, and active negotiations to bring the workshops into nearby public schools.
How It Got Here
The workshops exist because of Damon Yates, 34, who moved to St. Mary's County in 2019 for a job with the Coast Guard. Yates had started Krumping as a teenager in Compton. In Maryland, he couldn't find a single session within an hour's drive.
"I'd be at the Leonardtown skate park trying to freestyle by myself," Yates said. "People thought I was having a medical episode."
In late 2022, he emailed the St. Mary's City Community Center with a proposal: one free workshop, his own equipment, no cost to them. Twenty-three people showed up. Fourteen came back the next week. By March 2023, the center had given him a recurring Thursday slot and a small equipment budget.
Yates structured the sessions deliberately. He begins each workshop with a history lesson—Krump's origins in clown dancing, its evolution during the early 2000s, its distinction from commercial hip-hop—before moving into physical technique. The "lab," or freestyle circle, comes last. Dancers enter one by one. The rest of the room amplifies them through vocal percussion and shouts. Yates calls this the non-negotiable core.
"You can't separate Krump from the call-and-response," he said. "That's the vessel. The movement is the message, but the session is how it's delivered."
Who Shows Up
The participants defy easy categorization. There are high school students from Great Mills and Leonardtown, Coast Guard trainees from the local base, a 41-year-old dental hygienist from Callaway, and two brothers who drive 90 minutes from Salisbury because it's still the closest regular session on the Eastern Shore.
Jaxson Reeves, 22, now co-facilitates the workshops. He found Krump in 2022, during what he describes as a period of "bad hours and worse coping." Reeves had trained in ballet and contemporary at a studio in Lexington Park. He went to the community center workshop out of curiosity and stayed because of the exhaustion.
"Ballet gave me structure. Krump gave me a language for stuff I didn't want to say out loud," Reeves said. "There's a difference between performing sadness and having to get it out of your body because the room won't let you lie about it."
The "inclusive environment" the workshops claim is not accidental. Yates enforces a strict no-recording rule during freestyles unless every person in the circle consents. He also caps workshop fees at $10 and waives them entirely for anyone who asks. The result is a room where economic barriers are lowered by design, though Yates notes the limits of that model.
"We're not a nonprofit. We're three people with day jobs and a Square reader," he said. "If we want to keep this free, we need real funding. That's the next fight."
Tension and Translation
The growth has not been frictionless. In April 2023, the St. Mary's County Arts Council denied Yates's grant application, citing that Krump did not fit their "folk or traditional arts" priorities. Two board members, Yates later learned, had questioned whether the dance form was "appropriate" for county-supported venues.
The rejection galvanized rather than stalled the group. They held a benefit battle in the community center parking lot and raised $4,200—more than the grant would have provided. The event also attracted coverage from The Bay Net and Southern Maryland News, which brought wider attention and,
