CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | Contact
For Tane Wellington, there has been a lot of positives that came from growing up in both Australia and New Zealand.
For one, he was exposed to two of the best public education systems in the southern hemisphere. Two, he can now choose what football team he supports, whether it is the All Blacks or The Wallabies, based on who’s winning.
The 27-year-old corporate consultancy specialist says when you throw a young Aussie wife and a one-year-old son in the mix, life is pretty good.
However, despite all of his achievements as an upper-middle class suburban suit – it is not lost on Tane that he peaked in high school. Tane knows that he’ll never again be as cool as he was when he was krump battling to J-Squad in the car park to his high school train station.
Krump is a street dance popularized in the United States in the late 2000s, characterized by free, expressive, exaggerated, and highly energetic movement. The youths who started krumping saw the dance as a way for them to escape gang life and to release anger, aggression and frustration positively, in a non-violent way.
However, in Australia the artform from became a hit with young Kiwi and Polynesian youths in Queensland’s greater South East Corner, Tane was one of these young kids.
“I was part of sugar fam” he says, breaking away from his usual corporate jargon.
“We were the kings of South Bank busway”
With the dance style now about as popular as the macarena, Tane says he’s glad he didn’t spend too much time ‘trying to make it’ in the game.
“But I do wonder if my life would have been different if I made it to the states for my krumping”
“I could have been in Stomp The Yard II”
