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Six families, one lineage
Dancehall is not taught in levels. It is taught in families — each with its era, its originators and its own reason to exist. Start anywhere; you will end up needing all six.
There is no weekly class at the moment. Kriptic teaches privately, by appointment: you say which family you want to work on and where you are with it, and a date is agreed with you. Ask through the contact form — you will get the practical details back, dates and rate included.
Late 1980s – mid 2000s
Gerald “Bogle” Levy (1964–2005) gave Dancehall more of its vocabulary than any dancer before or since: the Bogle, the Log On, the Willie Bounce, Row Like a Boat, the Wacky Dip. This family runs from the late 1980s to the mid 2000s — the ground everything that follows is built on. You start where the culture starts: with the bounce.
Mid-2000s – early 2010s
Bogle is gone and the crews take the floor. Between the mid-2000s and the early 2010s, Ravers Clavers, Black Eagles and Overload Skankaz turn the street sessions of Kingston into a permanent workshop, and video carries every new step to the other side of the world within weeks. This is where Dancehall learns to travel, and where you learn to give the steps their context back.
2010s – present
New School is the only family in this school that is still being written. Since the early 2010s, Ding Dong and the Ravers Clavers have set the pace: steps and records released together, travelling the world in days. You will learn the movement, and you will learn where it came from — because a step that arrives without its story leaves as fast as it came.
Early 1960s – today
Skanking is older than Dancehall. It comes from the ska and rocksteady of the 1960s, and it is the rhythmic grammar every family that followed still speaks. You work the offbeat, the weight, the rebound and the shoulder — the four things that make a step read as Jamaican rather than merely look like one.
From the sound-system yards of the 1950s to today's weekly street dances
Dancehall was not born on a stage. It was born in a Kingston yard, around a sound system, in a crowd answering a selecta rather than facing an audience. This course teaches the social repertoire — the steps you dance in session — together with the codes of space, circle and riddim that give them their meaning.
Late 1970s – present
Gun Movies is the codified hand vocabulary of sound system culture — the gun salute, the forward, the lighter salute — the signals by which a crowd grants a tune its pull up. You study it the way an ethnographer would: what each gesture means, who it addresses, and how it came by its shape. It is a code of musical approval, and this course says so plainly: it celebrates no weapon.