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How a dance becomes a song becomes a movement

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Willie Bounce, Dutty Wine, Gully Creepa: dancehall's dance crazes travelled as a package deal of move, name and tune.

A recurring Jamaican pattern: a dancer invents a move, a deejay names a song after it, and the video light carries both around the world together — repeated from Bogle's 'Willie Bounce' to Tony Matterhorn's 'Dutty Wine.'

A dance needs a name

Bogle made the move; he named it Willie Bounce for his friend Willie Haggart of Black Roses Crew. But the dance did not travel on Bogle's steps alone — it took Elephant Man's 2003 single of the same name, plus a version by Voicemail, to carry Willie Bounce past Kingston and into the diaspora.

The same sequence — move, then name, then song, then video — repeats across decades of this atlas. Elephant Man alone rode it twice more with Gully Creepa and earlier hits; Tony Matterhorn rode it with 2006's Dutty Wine; Ding Dong and Ravers Clavers rode it with Badman Forward and Badman Pull Up. Even a Dutch footballer's surname could become a Jamaican dance craze, on Mr Vegas and Overmars's 2007 single Raging Bull.

First the step. Then the name. Then the tune that made the world learn both.

What kept the pipeline running was competition as much as creativity: crews measuring themselves against each other in what this atlas calls dance-crew battle culture, each one hunting for the next move worth naming.

profile · person · Well supportedWillie Haggart

William "Willie Haggart" Moore, leader of the Black Roses Crew — the Kingston corner crew whose dances Gerald "Bogle" Levy led — and one of 1990s dancehall's defining personalities: patron, host and centre of gravity for the scene around Arnett Gardens. He was shot dead in Kingston in April 2001, and his funeral at the National Arena — vast, lavish and heavily covered — became a public event in its own right, opening a documented national argument about dancehall, money and mourning that scholarship still cites. The Willie Bounce dance name is widely linked to him.

example · dance · ProbableWillie Bounce

A Jamaican dance or move associated with the street era.

profile · person · Well supportedTony Matterhorn

Selector who became an artist: after building his name on the sound-system circuit — including a celebrated run with New York's King Addies — Matterhorn voiced "Dutty Wine" in 2006, the dance-instruction record whose title move swept dancehall worldwide and stirred its own controversy. Few careers show the selector-to-deejay path more clearly.

example · dance · ProbableRaging Bull

A charging, horns-styled dancehall move credited to the dancer Overmars (of the Ravers Clavers), who is also documented as creator of Nuh Linga, Paper Bag and Nuh Behavior.

profile · person · Well supportedGerald "Bogle" Levy / Mr. Wacky

Gerald Levy, known as Bogle and later as Mr. Wacky, the dancer who did more than anyone to make dancehall choreography a named, authored thing. The Bogle, the Willie Bounce and a run of others came from him, and the pattern he set — a dance with a name, a creator and a record to carry it — is how dancehall movement has worked ever since. He was shot dead in Kingston in 2005.

example · dance · ProbableBadman Forward

Badman Forward is a named dancehall move associated with Ding Dong and the Ravers Clavers-era vocabulary, circulating through dance songs, street events and video clips as part of 2000s dancehall's call-and-response movement culture.

example · dance · Well supportedGully Creepa

One of the named dancehall moves of the late 2000s, danced low and prowling, and tied to the Gully side of the rivalry that dominated the period. Like most dancehall dances it arrived with a record to carry it and a video to teach it.

profile · person · Well supportedElephant Man

O'Neil Norman Bryan, born 11 September 1975, the deejay whose records did more than anyone's to make the 2000s dancehall era a dance era. He came up in Scare Dem Crew — formed in Seaview Gardens as the Seaview Family and renamed after Bounty Killer's hit "Big Guns Scare Dem" — before going solo in the late 1990s. What followed was a run of records built around specific dances, with the instruction in the lyric and the tempo shaped around the step, which is the tradition the Street dance grouping in this archive documents. His energy, his voice and his willingness to build a song around a move made him the most exportable dancehall artist of the period.

profile · person · Well supportedDing Dong

Ding Dong's recording-artist role covers the songs that package his dance vocabulary for circulation: tracks where movement instructions, crew identity and artist branding work together to move dances from Kingston events into global playlists and classes.

argument · concept · ProbableDance-crew battle culture

The dancehall custom of rival dance crews meeting to out-perform one another at street dances and on video, a competitive-but-collegial dynamic that echoes sound-system clash culture but is judged on steps and style rather than tunes, exemplified by the long-running Scare Dem Crew and Monster Shack Crew pairing.

profile · person · ProbableOvermars

Jamaican deejay best known for 'Raging Bull' (2007), a collaboration with Mr Vegas from the Hot It Up album on Delicious Vinyl that became one of the mid-2000s dance-craze singles driving new steps through Kingston's street dances.

example · dance · Well supportedDutty Wine

The dance that swept Jamaica and the diaspora around 2006, built on a fast whipping rotation of the head and neck. Tony Matterhorn's record of the same name carried it, and it became one of the most widely imitated — and most argued-over — dancehall dances to travel abroad.