Dancehall bodies, voices and vibes men

Bogle invented moves that a generation performed by name. Passa Passa turned a Kingston street into a Wednesday institution. The vibes man exists to lift a dance without singing a note. None of it is on a record, and all of it is why the records sound the way they do.

A dance with a name

Dancehall is unusual in naming its dances and knowing who made them. A move is invented at a session, given a name, performed until the room can do it, and then a deejay records a song instructing everyone to do it — at which point it belongs to the country. The chain from one person's idea to a national vocabulary can take a matter of weeks, and it is traceable in a way that almost no other popular dance culture is.

Gerald Levy, known as Bogle and later as Mr Wacky, is the central figure. Leading the Black Roses crew from the 1990s, he originated a run of dances that entered general use, and his own name became one of them. He was killed in Kingston in 2005; the Willie Bounce, created afterwards, is generally understood as a tribute. He is the clearest case of a dancer whose authorship the culture explicitly acknowledged.

The line continued through crews rather than individuals. Ding Dong and the Ravers Clavers built a career on choreography as much as on records, with songs that function as instructions and videos that function as lessons. A dancehall hit of that kind is not describing a dance that already exists; it is teaching one, and the teaching is the point.

The weekly calendar

The dances happened somewhere, and the somewhere was often a street. Passa Passa, held on Spanish Town Road in Tivoli Gardens from 2003, ran weekly into the early hours and drew a crowd that crossed Kingston's usual boundaries of neighbourhood and class, including visitors from abroad who had heard about it. Weddy Weddy on Wednesdays and other standing sessions built the same kind of institution elsewhere in the city.

A weekly street dance is a different thing from a concert. It is free or nearly free, it belongs to a specific place, and its regulars are known to each other, so a new dance move or a new record can be tested on a crowd that will be back next week to see what happened. Much of what reached the wider dancehall audience was worked out first on that circuit.

A dancehall song about a dance is not describing one. It is teaching one.

The video light

From the 1990s a camera operator with a bright lamp worked the crowd at every serious dance, and being caught in the video light was the point of the outfit. The tapes and later the uploads circulated internationally, which made a Kingston street session legible to viewers in London, Tokyo and New York, and made the dancers into public figures with recognisable names.

It also produced the archive. Almost everything known about how a specific dance was performed in a specific year exists because somebody was filming for the video-light trade rather than for posterity. As with the cassette tapes of the sound systems, the documentation is a by-product of a commercial habit, and it is more complete than anything an institution collected.

The vibes man

There is a role in a Jamaican dance with no equivalent in most music cultures: the man on the microphone who is neither the selector nor a recording artist, whose job is to raise the temperature. Joe Lickshot built a reputation on exactly this, working a dance with vocal sound effects that punctuated the selector's choices and told the crowd how to feel about them.

It is a genuinely skilled position. A vibes man who talks too much kills the tune; one who reads the room correctly makes an ordinary record land like an event. The role descends directly from the sound-system deejays of the 1960s, who began as hype men over other people's records before anyone thought to put them on one, and it kept that original function alive after deejaying became a recording career.

Taken together, the dancers, the weekly sessions and the voices on the microphone are what dancehall actually is at home. The records are the exportable residue of it. Anyone reading the discography alone will get the chronology right and miss the reason any of it happened.