Blacka Di Danca
Blacka Di Danca is a multifaceted cultural innovator, artist, and top-level executive with a global footprint as a dancer, choreographer, movement director, artist, and actor. He has toured and taught workshops in over 40 countries and 100 cities, including South America, Canada, Europe, and Russia. His current business ventures include working on new music, developing marketing campaigns, and producing apparel with his lifestyle brand Danca, digital media and marketing agency, Danca Media, and music label Danca Music Group.
Blacka was born in Brooklyn, New York, on December 16, 1989, at St. Mary’s Hospital in Crown Heights. Growing up in a Caribbean household relates to his earliest memories of learning to dance. In the Caribbean, a common practice for family members is to hold the child’s hands up while teaching them not only how to walk, but also how to whine at the waist. Blacka’s caribbean heritage played an integral role in his early inspiration to dance. He was surrounded by Reggae, Calypso, Soca, and Dancehall music at family and friend gatherings. For Blacka, this connection to his culture has been one of his greatest inspirations of strength and fortitude.
While growing up in New York, Blacka developed his self-expression by honing in on his creative abilities. He was particularly fond of art and spent a lot of time sketching, painting and drawing. In his earliest days of school at P.S. 8 in Brooklyn, he took African dance classes that sparked his inherent love for dance, as he recalls it being one of the most fun classes on the schedule. He furthered his creative exploration when he attended Satellite West Academy, where he studied art history, which served as a massive inspiration for his future crafts. These classes were a major inspiration for the young artist. As he got older, he developed his love for movement even more through karate and martial arts practice.
Blacka’s huge love for art also set the tone for his academic studies. A turning point in the young dancer’s life was when he auditioned for the Brooklyn High School of the Arts, formerly known as the Sarah J. Hale Highschool, which propelled him to learn even more about art and creativity. This immersion in fine arts studies sharpened his self-expression.
In 2002, Blacka began exploring more and more of Brooklyn’s robust dancehall scene. It was his mission to learn everything he could about the genre and dancing. Through rain and snow, Blacka would take the train, or any means he could, to attend dances in every borough and every night of the week. It became his passion to learn as much as he could to become one of the best in the game.
Blacka began learning more about music and performing when he regularly joined the group New Kingston on the road. One night after a show where the group opened and played alongside Frankie Paul, he was able to stay in the club after hours, which made history as the night he experienced his first dancehall party.
This early dancehall experience would change his life as he realized dancing was something he felt called to do. When he looked into the crowd he saw two dancers doing the same dance in matching outfits and this sportsmanship reminded him of synchronized swimming. After that vivid introduction to Jamaican movement and sound, Blacka reached out to his friend JC Smoove, who was also a dancer. From there, he started training with Smoove’s guidance, which led him to begin learning Passa Passa dances by watching the Jamaican-based dancehall event on DVDs.
As he started going to various clubs including Temptations on Church Avenue, dancing became a nightly routine. Some of Blacka’s earliest influences came from the Crazy Hype Family, Active Dancers, and French Konnection dance crews, which he would watch as a means to learn. As his profile started rising in the dance scene, so did that of New Kingston as not only a band but also a sound system. Whenever they were booked for events, they would enlist Blacka as their official dancer, creating the show that would officially launch Blacka Di Danca.
As Blacka continued dancing and becoming more known on the Brooklyn scene, he began to overcome his early fears of stage fright. As his eyes got brighter, his smile grew wider and the opportunities began to pour in. One of his earliest memories of patrons watching him dance and liking what he brought to the table was a Dance competition at the Binghamton University Carnival. Blacka performed to an excitedly engaged audience with longtime friend DJ AK where he took home first place.
This constant study of dance and movement became a prevalent aspect of Blacka’s life. He heavily immersed himself into dancehall culture, honorarily adopted as a Jamaican, through his experience literally living in the dancehalls of Brooklyn. For him, his love of dancehall was also about understanding the people, the food, the taste, and the sounds. In 2007, he experienced his first booking to perform in Virginia with JC Smoove and Byrd Hype.
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