Gun Moves

Where it comes from: the sound system

A sound system dance has never been a concert. From the 1950s, when the first mobile sets rolled out across Kingston, the selecta and the crowd worked as two halves of a single instrument: the selecta proposed, the floor answered, and the answer decided what played next. Most Dancehall courses teach you the crowd's feet. This one starts with its hands.

At the centre sits the raised hand, the gun finger, also called the gun salute. Index out, thumb up, arm lifted toward the tower. It carries one message: this tune is right, run it back. When enough hands go up at the same moment, the selecta hauls the record, the sound cuts dead, and the tune restarts from the top. That restart is the pull up, and it is the highest verdict a dance can hand down.

The shape of the gesture is not an accident, and this course does not pretend otherwise. Accounts of Jamaican dances in the 1970s and 1980s describe live rounds fired into the air to salute a tune, a practice that cost lives. What outlived it is the sign, emptied of the act it once imitated. The raised finger became the equivalent of a standing ovation, made with a hand because at that volume applause simply cannot be heard.

The code travelled with the records. In London, Bristol and Birmingham the same raised hand passed from reggae into jungle and then into grime, keeping its function and picking up a vocal along the way: the "brap".

Where it comes from: the street

In informal settings, gun moves have another source: the reality of violence, fights and gunfights among the people. How a man pulls a gun to rob someone, to hit someone, to shoot at someone. How he poses and shows off the gun he carries. These are patterns of real life, and dancers take them into account the same way they take in every other daily pattern: the way people walk, greet, cook or survive. You can call it a lifestyle reality, observed and translated.

Every time a gun is used and witnessed by artists, dancers or other creative people, the action is registered. Then it comes back out in their work. An artist puts it in a lyric. A dancer puts it in a move. A painter paints a street scene where a man pulls a gun. Each creator interprets the same reality through their own medium. Gun moves are the dancer's version of that testimony.

Levels of intensity

Because the inspiration varies, gun moves carry different levels of aggression.

The lighter end draws on ceremony and fiction: the gun salute, the gun pull up at the dance, the posture of a hero in a gun movie. These moves are about signalling, celebration and style.

The more dynamic end draws on harder sources: war, real criminal gun battles, confrontations with the police, and the most intense action films. These moves are sharper, faster and more aggressive, because the reality behind them is.

Understanding where a move sits on that scale is part of dancing it honestly. You cannot give a war-inspired move the energy of a salute, or a salute the energy of a gunfight.

The gestures, and what each one says

The gun salute is a matter of economy. One hand held high for four bars carries further than twenty flicks: a floor reads duration, not repetition. It is also a judgement, which is why it belongs to people who know the tune.

The forward is the full-body version: the surge that crosses a floor a beat before the rewind lands. The word names both the crowd's demand and the selecta's answer: "haul an' pull up", "wheel an' come again".

The lighter salute plays in an older, warmer register. A flame raised for a foundation tune, for a singer, for a name the room has not forgotten. Most floors now lift a phone torch instead: the object changed, the meaning held.

Badman Forward, Badman Pull Up stages the exchange itself: the body advancing on the forward and reversing on the pull up. The floor stops describing the rewind and becomes it.

How the work is done

We start with context. Before any movement, you learn which source a move comes from, the dance or the street, and where it sits on the scale of intensity.

Then the ear. Sessions run with a selecta and real tunes, because timing is a listening skill before it is a movement skill. You learn to hear a rewind coming: the two bars that set it up, the intro of a dub plate, the line of lyric that tips a room over.

Then the placement. Your signal has to land inside the phrase, not after it: a selecta needs the verdict while there is still time to act on it.

Then the mechanics. The arm travels from the shoulder and the elbow, never from a flick of the wrist, and the bounce never stops underneath. An arm raised on a dead body reads as a photograph, not a movement.

Last, the right energy. Each move is danced at the intensity of the reality it comes from, no more and no less.

What goes wrong

• Aiming at a person. The salute goes up and toward the tower, never level, never at another dancer. Any orientation that reads as pointing at somebody is corrected on the spot, every time.
• Mixing up the levels. Dancing a salute with the aggression of a gunfight, or a street-inspired move with no weight behind it. Each move has its own intensity.
• Spraying it. Small repeated movements empty the sign out: it stops being a verdict and turns into a tic.
• Arriving after. Signalling once the rewind is already running is applauding a decision somebody else made.
• Performing violence instead of interpreting it. A dancer translates what they witnessed. Turned into a pose for a camera, the move loses its meaning and keeps only its threat.