Middle School

After Bogle

In January 2005, Gerald "Bogle" Levy was shot dead in Kingston. For fifteen years he had given Dancehall much of its vocabulary — the Bogle, Log On, Wacky Dip, Willie Bounce — and the culture lost the dancer everybody had been watching. What happened next is why this family exists.

The gap was not filled by another lone author. It was filled by crews. Ravers Clavers, Black Eagles, Overload Skankaz and the crews around them made dance creation collective work. A step was built in rehearsal, tested in front of a Kingston crowd on a session night, and either kept or dropped within the week. Where the previous era had a signature, this one had a workshop.

The street sessions were the laboratory. Passa Passa, running from 2003 in Tivoli Gardens, took over a road and held the crowd until sunrise, and the weekly sessions across the city did the same on smaller streets. Nobody released a step. You performed it, and the crowd decided whether it lived.

Then came the cameras. Session DVDs circulated hand to hand, and from 2005 onward YouTube collapsed the distance entirely. A step made in Kingston on a Wednesday could be studied in Tokyo, Paris or Moscow inside a month. In August 2008, Usain Bolt crossed the finish line in Beijing and danced the Gully Creepa in front of a global television audience. Dancehall went viral a decade before the word meant anything.

That speed is the real subject of this family. It gave the dance to the world, and it stripped many steps of the context that made them legible. Learning Middle School properly means putting the context back.

The steps, and what they carry

Willie Bounce is the hinge. Bogle created it in 2004 and named it for Willie Haggart, his friend killed in 2001 — a dance built as a memorial, which is worth sitting with before you drill it. The bounce lives in the shoulders and the ribcage while the feet travel laterally. It belongs to the previous era by authorship and to this one by circulation.

Pon di River, Pon di Bank, carried by Elephant Man's 2003 record, works the same hinge from the music side. It shows how this culture makes a step legible: name it after an image anyone can picture — down in the river, up on the bank — and the body reads the instruction without translation.

Dutty Wine, which spread in 2006 behind Tony Matterhorn's record, is the family's cautionary tale. What travelled was the head rotation. What stayed home was everything holding it up: the grounded stance, the wine driven from the hips, the timing that makes the head follow the body instead of leading it. Copied without that, it became a stunt, and it was reported as one.

Nuh Linga, created by Ding Dong around 2006, is a statement more than an instruction. Do not linger. The step is quick, light on the ground, the arms cutting the air ahead of the feet. Here the attitude is the technique.

Gully Creepa came out of Ravers Clavers and reached the world in 2008. It creeps: weight forward and low, one shoulder leading, the walk deliberately uneven. The name points at the concrete drainage gullies of Kingston, and it arrived while the gully and gaza camps were splitting the music down the middle. It is not a mood. It is a place.

Sesame Street shows the other reflex of the period: Dancehall quoting global pop culture straight back at it, bright and bouncy and entirely its own.

How we work them

You learn the bounce before anything else. Almost every step in this family sits on the same engine — a continuous rocking of the weight through the knees and the ribcage — and the arms are the last thing added, never the first. If your bounce dies the moment the arms arrive, the step is not learned yet.

Then you drill to riddim. Each step is counted in eights at half tempo, then at tempo, then over three different riddims so the movement stops depending on one song.

Then you train transitions, because that is how the era actually danced. Nobody performed one step for four minutes. Steps were strung together on the spot, read off the selector and the crowd. The joins are where the dancing lives.

And you watch the source. Before drilling a step, we watch the original footage — the crew, the session, the year — and name out loud what we see.

Common mistakes

• Arms first. The most frequent error by far, and it hollows out every step in this family.
• Dancing on top of the riddim. These steps sit inside the beat, slightly behind its surface. Rushing them is what makes copied Dancehall look copied.
• Treating steps as choreography. They are vocabulary. If you can only perform them in the order you learned them, you have memorised a sequence, not learned a language.
• Size before cleanliness. Big and vague is not a more advanced stage than small and exact.
• Learning from a tutorial alone. A tutorial gives you the shape. The original video gives you the intention, the crew, and the reason it was named what it was named.