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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.
What is taught here in person goes online this autumn: the six families filmed and broken down, plus Battle Combo — the sequences built for the floor, taken apart and explained. Passes from 15.90 € a month, and a free challenge open before that.
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 – today
New School is the only family in this school that is still being written. Since the 2010s, the pace has been set by crews rather than by single stars: teams that build a step together, test it in the street dances, film it, and send it around the world within days.
Early 1960s – today
Skanking is older than Dancehall. It was born from the Jamaican way of life, and the ska and rocksteady of the 1960s gave it a rhythm and a name. It is the grammar every family that followed still speaks. You work the intention, the offbeat, the weight, the rebound and the shoulder: the 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 moves people dance in session, together with the everyday life they come from and the codes of space, circle and riddim that give them their meaning.
Late 1970s – present
Gun moves come from two places. The first is the dance itself: the codified hand language of sound system culture, including the gun salute, the forward and the lighter salute, by which a crowd grants a tune its pull up. The second is the street: the reality of violence, fights and gunfights that people live with or witness, turned into patterns of movement by the dancers who saw it. You study both the way an ethnographer would: what each gesture means, where it comes from, and what it reflects. This course documents a reality. It celebrates no weapon.