Dancehall in the Footwork

The shorthand version of Brooklyn drill says the music came from Chicago through London and the dance followed the music. The shorthand is partly right and mostly wrong. The dance has its own ancestry, and a large portion of that ancestry runs through Kingston, Spanish Town, and the wider Caribbean. Look at the footwork on a Brooklyn drill cypher floor and the dancehall inheritance is visible. The hips lead. The shoulders are squared but loose. The weight stays low. The feet do small, fast, ground-hugging patterns rather than the high-bounce footwork of, say, Detroit jit. The movement vocabulary is closer to bogle and willie bounce than to any midwestern footwork tradition. This is not a coincidence. Brooklyn neighborhoods like East Flatbush, Crown Heights, and Canarsie are deeply Caribbean. Many of the dancers were raised in households where dancehall was the music in the background of childhood. The body, before it was ever a dancer's body, had absorbed the hip-and-knee logic of the music. When drill arrived as a sound, the Brooklyn body responded with the movement vocabulary it already had. The dance is, in this sense, drill on top of a Caribbean substrate. The substrate explains several features that the Chicago-import story does not explain. The prominence of the chest pop, which has clearer lineage in dancehall than in midwestern footwork. The lateral hip slide, which is a dancehall step before it was ever a drill step. The way the upper body 'tells the story' while the lower body holds rhythm — this is dancehall's idiom, not drill's. Older dancers in the scene will, when asked, name the dancehall inheritance freely. Younger dancers sometimes do not know the lineage. The dance, to them, is what they learned in the cypher. The history is invisible from inside the form. This is normal. Every dance tradition forgets its own ancestors after a generation. The forgetting is part of how new vocabularies come to feel self-contained. Worth noting: the dancehall inheritance is part of why the scene is welcoming to dancers with Caribbean training. A dancer who came up in a household with sound-system culture and made the transition to drill dance is operating on well-developed muscle memory. The transition is shorter than it looks from outside. The vocabulary is, in the deep structure, the same vocabulary with a different name on the bandstand. Workshops that teach both — dancehall foundation in the morning, drill cypher in the evening — tend to produce stronger students than workshops that teach only the surface drill steps. The underneath has to be there. The underneath, for this scene, is Caribbean.