About Kriptic

Why this school exists

I did not plan to become a teacher. I planned to dance, and dancing took me out of one room and into hundreds of others — sessions, stages, studios, competition floors, in twenty-six countries so far. In almost every one of them I had the same conversation.

Someone shows me a step learned from a video. The shape is often good, sometimes excellent. Then I ask who made it, and when, and what that person was answering to. The room goes quiet.

That silence is the reason DanceHall OnLine Lab exists. Steps cross borders on their own. The stories inside them do not travel unless somebody carries them on purpose. I decided to be one of the people who carries them.

What I mean by culture

Dancehall was not invented for classes. It was built in Jamaica — in yards, on street corners, in front of sound systems — by people with names, saying something precise with their bodies about the lives they were living. A dancer makes a move at a session. The crowd takes it up. A deejay records a tune that names it. The tune travels, and the move travels inside it.

Once you have seen that mechanism, you cannot unsee it. You stop asking what a step looks like and start asking what it is for. That shift is what I want to produce in you. Not more choreography — better hearing.

So in class we name the creator whenever he or she is documented, and say plainly when they are not. Guessing is worse than silence. I would rather teach you five steps you can place in time than fifty you can only imitate.

The six families

I teach six families. They are not commercial levels: they follow the real chronology and geography of the dance.

• Bogle — Old & Mid School, the founding vocabulary.
• Middle School, the bridge years.
• New School, what the floor is doing now.
• Skanking, the root of the bounce and the older Jamaican dances underneath it.
• Social Moves, the steps a crowd does together — the ones that actually make a party.
• Gun Movies, the hand language a floor uses to answer the selecta.

You can start anywhere. I will always send you back to the foundations. There is no version of this where you skip the bounce.

Di World Dance Master

I go by Di World Dance Master. It is not a ranking; it is closer to a job description. The world part is the twenty-six countries and everything they corrected in me. The master part is an obligation: I was trusted to pass on something that does not belong to me. Jamaica made this. I am one link in a chain.

Alongside the school I work as an entrepreneur and an event organiser. With 1 Dream 1 Culture I run Europe Dancehall King & Queen, now in its second edition: three days where European dancers are measured against the standards of the culture rather than those of a stage show. Teaching and organising are the same job: one builds dancers, the other builds the floor they need.

What I ask, and what I refuse to sell

Attention before talent. Accept that understanding takes longer than copying, and that the first weeks are slow on purpose. Say a creator’s name correctly. Work the bounce long after you think you have it, because you do not yet.

In exchange, no shortcut. You will not master a family in a term. What you get is a foundation solid enough that the culture becomes readable — on the floor, in the music, in the videos you thought you already understood.

Come as you are

I am based in Paris and I teach here. You need no experience, no particular body, no dance background — only to show up, listen, work, and be honest about where you stand.

Come as you are, and find the part of you that already belongs to this. What you leave with is not a routine. It is a place in something older than you, and the right to stand in it knowingly.