08 · STREET DANCES & NIGHT ECONOMY
A weekly dance can move a global culture.
2000s
Street dances, dancers, crews, fashion, videographers, selectors and vendors turn nightlife into a worldwide movement laboratory.
Inside this era
◷ Calendar
A dance for every night
Passa Passa on Spanish Town Road on a Wednesday, Weddy Weddy in Stone Love's yard, Uptown Mondays at Savannah Plaza, Boasy Tuesdays, Dutty Fridays, Early Mondays in Rae Town. Free at the gate, held in the road itself, and running until the sun came up — a weekly circuit that made the street the main venue of Jamaican music in the 2000s.
✦ Movement
Dancers name the moves
Gerald "Bogle" Levy and the Black Roses Crew invented steps — Bogle, Willie Bounce, Log On, Row Di Boat — that artists then wrote songs about, so a dance created a record rather than the other way round. Ravers Clavers, Overload Skankaz and later crews kept the loop running, and the steps were being taught in Tokyo and Berlin within months.
$ Economy
The people around the dance
Food and drink vendors, sound crew, selectors, promoters, hairdressers and dressmakers, taxi and bus operators, and the videographer whose handheld light picks a dancer out of the dark. The video light decided who was seen, and being seen was the point — footage from a Kingston street corner sold clothes, filled parties and made careers.
Close up
Street dance
Passa Passa
Started in 2003 on Spanish Town Road in Tivoli Gardens and quickly drew uptown and downtown, tourists and touring artists to the same stretch of asphalt on a Wednesday night. For a few years it was the most-filmed dancefloor in the Caribbean.
Law
The Noise Abatement Act
The 1997 Act, and the police power to shut a dance down at 2am, sits underneath the whole decade. Every promoter, every sound and every street dance in this era operates in negotiation with it.