Van culture and the street dance

O'Neil Miles founded the Kingston sound system Swatch International in 1991; the sound went on to help launch the 'Passa Passa' street dance in West Kingston in March 2003.

Weddy Weddy Wednesdays is a Kingston weekly dance associated with Stone Love Movement, important as a recurring space where selectors, dancers, artists and camera crews could test songs and moves in front of a live dancehall crowd. Conceived by Wee Pow, reportedly with Elephant Man, sources place its start somewhere between 2001 and 2004 without agreeing on the exact year. It is held at Stone Love HQ, 41 Burlington Avenue, Eastwood Park Gardens, St Andrew.

The dancehall 'video light', the bright camera or videographer's light that dancers and stylish patrons perform toward at sessions such as Passa Passa, a practice tied to visibility, glamour and self-fashioning, and to debates about display and materialism.

The Tuesday-night street dance on Spanish Town Road in Tivoli Gardens, running from 2003, which became the defining event of the street-dance era: a weekly gathering that crossed garrison lines, drew crowds from across Kingston and abroad, and made the video light, the dancers and the dances into the centre of dancehall culture for a decade.

Customised vehicles displayed at the dance, parked and shown off as part of the same performance of status as the fashion and the video light. The practice is older than the street-dance era it is usually illustrated with: from the middle 1990s Kingston crews were cutting the roofs clean off pickup trucks and fitting them with body kits, boosted sound systems, graffiti paint, custom rims and, on a few, hydraulics that rotated the cargo bed — the scene the Gleaner later called topless, and out of which the Topless Crew got its name. By the 2000s the same display had moved to cars and SUVs outside Passa Passa and its peers. The vehicle is not transport to the dance; it is part of what is being shown at it.

Promoter and executive associated with Passa Passa in the West Kingston street dance's later years, interviewed by The FADER in 2010 about the event's history and its place in Jamaica's street-dance economy.

Winston "Wee Pow" Powell's Kingston sound, built in 1972 on locally made amplifiers and now the most durable operation in dancehall — a sound that outlived the eras it played through. Stone Love defined juggling culture and the weekly dance as an institution, and its selector roll (Rory, Geefus, Billy Slaughter, Diamond, Scary Gary and many more) reads as a history of the craft. Its tapes are among the most widely circulated documents of Jamaican dance culture.

Swatch International is a Kingston sound system founded in 1991 by O'Neil Miles. It became closely identified with 'Passa Passa,' the West Kingston street dance it helped ignite in March 2003, and continues to tour internationally on Jamaica's sound-system circuit.

Uptown Mondays is a Kingston weekly dance and nightlife event associated with 2000s dancehall selector culture, part of the event circuit that gave new songs, fashions and choreography a regular public testing ground.