Street dance and the move

Street dances turned nightlife into a laboratory where named dances were created and spread worldwide.

Jamaica's street dance scene traces back to the same late-1950s/early-1960s moment that produced ska - open-air dances built the audience the new music needed. By the 1990s, dancehall's street parties had become a laboratory for named, choreographed moves invented and taught on the spot. Gerald "Bogle" Levy, a Trench Town dancer, became the era's most prolific inventor: dancers across Kingston would wait to see "what Bogle drop now," and his moves - the Bogle, Willie Bounce, Wacky Dip, Row di Boat and dozens more - spread neighborhood to neighborhood before any video existed to record them. That culture found a fixed weekly home in Passa Passa, a street party that began in Kingston's Tivoli Gardens on Ash Wednesday 2003 and became a stage where dancers like Bogle and Ding Dong debuted new moves to a live crowd, later carried worldwide by video and, eventually, social media.

Bogle and Jamaican street dance history: Wikipedia (Bogle dance); the Reggae Museum profile of Gerald "Bogle" Levy; Wikipedia (Passa Passa). Passa Passa's founding date (Ash Wednesday 2003) and the full list of Bogle-originated moves come from secondary sources and would benefit from a primary interview pass.